Jidu Auto presents their two first electric vehicle models

Jidu Auto presents their two first electric vehicle models

elective.com — 2023-01-02

Automotive Industry

The Chinese electric car joint venture Jidu Auto of Baidu and Geely has presented its first two models. These are an electric SUV and an electric sedan, which are intended to focus on autonomous driving.

The Robo-01 is an e-SUV with two electric drives that produce a combined 400 kW and a 100 kWh battery from CATL, which is said to provide a range of 600 km according to Chinese standards. Deliveries of the Robo-01 are scheduled to begin during 2023.

The Robo-02 is an e-sedan for which no technical data has yet been released. Should the sedan take over the drive of the SUV model, the range should exceed that of the SUV due to better aerodynamics.

As the model names of the two vehicles already suggest, the Jidu models are supposed to be robot cars. The e-drive in the form of Geely’s SEA hardware platform is thus only the basis for the autonomous driving functions and the connectivity software that Baidu wants to contribute. One example: unlike the E-SUV, the Robo-02 no longer has door handles – the doors can be opened by voice command or by smartphone via a Bluetooth connection.

There is no further information about the computer hardware for the Baidu software for the Robo-02. The Robo-01 is equipped with two Nvidia Orin X chips that offer up to 508 TOPS of computing power. The SUV also has 31 sensors, including two lidar units, five millimetre-wave radar sensors, 12 ultrasonic radars and 12 HD cameras.

Baidu and Geely had announced about a year ago that they would invest a total of about $400m in their electric car joint venture Jidu Auto. The Robo-01 has been on sale in China since last October and costs €54,240 in the limited ‘Lunar Edition’.