At last year’s 2022 Baidu World Conference, Baidu’s sixth-generation mass-produced unmanned vehicle Apollo RT6 was officially released, but there has been no new news since.
It is found that this model appeared in the models declared by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology last month. It is a “battery-swapping pure electric multi-purpose passenger vehicle” from Jiangling Group New Energy Vehicle Co., Ltd.
As can be seen from the application drawing, the tail mark of this car is still RT6, but the product trademark is displayed as “Yichi”, which is a brand that has not been announced before.
The car has dimensions of 4765 x 1885 x 1715mm and a wheelbase of 2830mm. It is equipped with BYD Fudi Power 110kW motor and honeycomb energy battery, and supports battery swapping.
Compared with the concept car announced last year, the mass-produced RT6 has many changes in design. The most obvious is the addition of exterior rearview mirrors, and the design of the headlights, front bumper, and taillights have also changed.
According to information from Baidu’s previous press conference, Apollo RT6 has the ability to drive autonomously on complex urban roads. The cost of mass production has been reduced from the original 1-2 million CNY to 250,000 CNY, which is reduced to 1/10 of the industry. The prices of ordinary new energy vehicles on the market are about the same. According to plan, Baidu will use RT6 on the Luobo Kuaipao platform in 2023, and tens of thousands of vehicles can be deployed across the country in the future.
In terms of smart cockpit, Apollo RT6 supports two modes: with and without steering wheels. The front row can be equipped with seats, vending machines, desks, game consoles, etc. according to different travel scenarios to meet passengers’ diverse needs for work and entertainment. In addition, Apollo RT6 has a large rear space of 1050mm, independent seats and a rearward-moving design of the intelligent interactive system.
Apollo RT6 is derived from Baidu’s self-developed “Apollo Galaxy” architecture platform. As the first model of this platform, Apollo RT6 has achieved 100% car-grade and full vehicle redundancy systems, which is more reliable than modified cars on the market. The performance is two to three orders of magnitude higher, fully ensuring passenger travel safety. In terms of hardware, Apollo RT6 has seven fully redundant systems such as architecture redundancy, computing unit redundancy, and braking system redundancy. If a single component or system fails, the backup redundant system can instantly replace it; in software , equipped with a fault diagnosis and risk reduction system that integrates the vehicle + autonomous driving system.
