[File photo]

A self-driving vehicle service will be commercially viable in China by 2018, while the mass production of self-driving cars will be realized within five years, China’s Internet giant Baidu announced on Nov. 3. Currently, 18 car and Internet companies have revealed similar plans, among which Baidu is the leading enterprise.

The remark was made by Wang Jin, senior vice president of Baidu, at the Global Innovator Conference in Beijing. Wang stated that the company is going to test its self-driving cars during the third World Internet Conference, which will be held in Zhejiang province from Nov. 16 to 18.

“We are not going showcase our self-driving cars as models. Instead, they will run on real roads, and we will invite passengers to try our self-driving vehicle service,” Wang told the media, adding that the company’s self-driving cars have already passed one driving test out of five.

Baidu has made significant achievements this year in self-driving technology. The company's self-driving cars now boast accuracy of 90.13 percent when it comes to the recognition of objects, slightly higher than last year’s 89.6 percent. For the recognition of passengers and traffic lights, the vehicles score 95 percent and 99.9 percent respectively, Thepaper.cn reported.

“Though our camera recognition technologies are the best in the world, we still believe that camera recognition is not enough for self-driving cars,” Wang said, adding that the company has been working on laser radar technologies to improve the accuracy of their self-driving vehicles.