JIDU, a partnership between Baidu and Geely, unveiled a pre-production robocar concept called the ROBO-01 EV. It’s a car designed to lead us into the era of intelligent AI-driven cars. It features a deformable structure, 3D borderless one-piece large control screen and zero-gravity seating.

AI pixel lights display things like a thumbs-up sign in the headlight area to show off how the car has a trainable functionality. It can learn autonomous driving and sense the needs of the driver. JIDU developed a system called JIDU robocar neural JET (JIDU Evolving Technology) that helps the car learn high-level autonomous driving capabilities and an intelligent voice assistant.

Related: 14 e-bikes you’ve heard of, and some you likely haven’t

Furthermore, JIDU designed the car to show how the automotive industry has shifted from combustion engines to EVs. Now, it is shifting into intelligent cars.

“The Intelligent Car 3.0 Era is the era of robocars,” said Xia Yiping, CEO of JIDU. “The transition to this new era is marked by the shift of driving power from humans to AI, with robocars ultimately achieving self-generating progress led by AI. The automotive industry in the 3.0 era will see a seismic shift from a revolution in energy to a revolution in product attributes.”

The ROBO-01 EV has no door handles, indicator levers or other control keys, featuring butterfly wing doors and a futuristic body design. The interior reconfigures in unique ways. First, the front hood has a collapsible LiDAR for improved safety by retracting before a crash. Secondly, an active liftable rear ROBOWing improves aerodynamics. Lastly, the car features a foldable U-shaped steering wheel that pulls out of the way during autonomous driving and liftable satellite speakers.

The AI inside the cabin recognizes user’s emotions and interact with the outside world by expressing emotion. The AI interacts with the driver by voice interaction system. Additionally, JIDU uses full-stack Apollo autonomous driving and safety capabilities for a high-level self-driving feature. The system was tested by the company’s Robotaxi, which has logged 27 million kilometers of safe autonomous driving miles in 30 cities across China.

Think this all sounds a bit like vaporware that will never come to market? JIDU claims the concept car is 90% similar to the production model coming this fall. We’ll see how many of these advanced features are ready to hit the road later this year.

+ Baidu

Images via Baidu