Banned Driverless Car Puts Chinese Tech CEO In The Police Firing Line

As it turns out, phoning an AI developer conference from a car that's driving itself down a busy Chinese highway doesn't go down well with the Beijing authorities...
Banned Driverless Car Puts Chinese Tech CEO In The Police Firing Line

A Chinese tech company CEO has landed himself in hot water with Beijing police after appearing to use driverless car functions – currently banned in China.

Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, made a phone call to a conference of artificial intelligence developers from the passenger seat of a car travelling down a busy motorway under its own control. There was another executive in the driving seat, we understand, but he wasn’t making any control inputs.

Remote video URL

Beijing police have apparently lost their cool after finding out about the ‘stunt’. Via infamously authoritarian Chinese social media the force said they “attach great importance to this matter and are actively carrying out investigations and verification.” China has previously banned self-driving cars until the authorities can figure out a set of laws for them.

Apparently this would go down as an ‘unlicensed’ driver offence, the maximum fine for which is (wait for it) about £20. The bigger punishment is that the car could be ‘confiscated’. The way China works, the government will probably just want to harvest some profitable technology for itself. Give it six months and there’ll be a new state-owned tech firm pumping out driverless car software…

Via: The Guardian

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Comments

Zubayer Rezoan
07/06/2017 - 08:31 |
66 | 1

Question still remains

07/06/2017 - 08:44 |
2 | 1

Probably a bar code or something

07/06/2017 - 15:56 |
2 | 0
TheMindGarage

This ie exactly why driverless cars are still a long way off. The laws surrounding what would happen if one crashes are just too complex. The media have you believe that everyone will be in driverless cars by 2020, but I don’t think we’ll reach 50% uptake until 2040, and 100% uptake will never happen, mostly because of us petrolheads.

07/06/2017 - 09:44 |
20 | 1

There’s also the fact that there aren’t even any truly driverless cars on the market yet, which a lot of media seem to forget.

07/06/2017 - 09:55 |
3 | 0
Boosted69420

pretty sure the word confiscated should have been impounded but IDK

07/06/2017 - 09:52 |
1 | 2

Welcome to the mysterious world of Chinese-to-English translation xD.

07/06/2017 - 09:58 |
0 | 0

Confiscated means taken, so it’s perfectly fine where it is.

07/06/2017 - 10:02 |
1 | 0
Boosted69420

it’s actually confiscated for illegal modification
Also 200RMB for merging on soild line(twice)

07/06/2017 - 09:58 |
0 | 0
Fouck hahaha

Sooo, China have banned the self-crashing system? They are smarter than Europe and USA…

07/07/2017 - 12:15 |
2 | 0
Anonymous

Just eliminate autopilot and end problem

07/07/2017 - 16:25 |
0 | 0
Anonymous

Make another review, its 2017, must have more interesting features, easter eggs…?=)
I’m talking about the Tesla video of course=)

07/09/2017 - 09:34 |
0 | 0
Anonymous

thats why we shouldnt have this its just stupid

07/10/2017 - 09:00 |
0 | 0