By Tang Guhan
Telecom giant, the Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. announced Wednesday it would establish an innovative center with the Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. on a joint venture of developing autonomous vehicles in the 5G era.
The pair will join hands in areas of mobile telecom, operational systems, chips and networking in cars.
Zhang Baolin, the chairman of Changan Auto, noted the company was transforming itself from a traditional car maker to a tech company who would provide smart driving products and services to its customers.
Huawei initiated its Research and Development (R&D) on 5G as early as 2009. It has set up as much as eleven 5G research centers around the world. Thousands of experts employed by the company have been working in the area.
Changan Auto has already established itself in the field of autonomous cars. It accomplished unmanned-driving tests of a 2,000 kilometers' distance from Chongqing City to Beijing in 2016. The aggregated investments into the area have amounted to RMB1.6 billion during 2018.
It planned to put together an autonomous driving R&D team with a total investment worth RMB 20 billion in the next 10 years.
The company owns a Level 3 (L3) autonomous driving technology and active park assist (APA) 6.0 automatic parking technology as of now.
Furthermore, Changan is slated to halt its manufacturing and selling of traditional fuel-powered vehicles by 2025 and will electrify their cars by then.
Leveraged by Huawei's technologies in battery charging and power, the pair will jointly push forward with the development of new energy vehicles (NEVs).
The two companies will also collaborate in building an Industrial Internet platform to develop an industrial internet, data storage, servers, and cloud computing services among others.
