Another highlight of the Auto China 2024 show in Beijing was a chance to experience one of the most advanced autonomous driving systems currently available to use on public roads: JiYue’s Point-to-Point Autopilot (PPA). This is available in all JiYue’s cars, including the 07 that was launched at the show. We got to see its capabilities in JiYue’s first model, the 01.
During our test drive, we weren’t allowed to sit behind the steering wheel, because you can’t drive in China on a British license. You need to go through a rather bureaucratic procedure to have your UK document translated and accredited. Instead, we sat beside a JiYue employee, who was also able to explain the features during the journey from our hotel to a Beijing racetrack.
PPA doesn’t drive on all types of roads like Tesla’s Full Self Driving City Beta yet, but on the other hand the latter is only available to use in a few parts of the USA at the moment. You can deploy PPA in eight Chinese cities right now and JiYue expects that to rise to 200 cities by the end of 2024. Our driver had to take the car manually out of the hotel car park onto a highway before PPA could be enabled.
Once it took over, however, PPA’s performance was impressive. Not once did the driver have to intervene, despite the decidedly bonkers Beijing traffic. PPA is a Level 3 system, although it hasn’t been certified as this yet due to the difficulties of the regulatory process, so the drive does regularly need to show they are attentive and able to step in if required. It does much more than an adaptive cruise control system with lane centring like Tesla Autopilot, however. It does more than Tesla’s Navigate on Autopilot, too. The latter will suggest a lane change, but you have to hit the indicator to execute the move.
PPA does this automatically, switching lanes to overtake slow vehicles. It stops at red traffic lights and then restarts when they go green. It will switch lanes in good time when it knows there’s a junction you need to take ahead. Most impressive is how it handles merging from a slip road into another highway. We were performing this manoeuvre where there were cars coming from the left, a stream of bikes and scooters in a different lane, and pedestrians crossing in both directions. Yet PPA waited for a safe gap and pulled out without issue.
It was a very impressive feat, and a large percentage of our whole journey was performed by the car. The driver did have to keep showing his hands were ready to take control of the wheel, and had to take over again when we entered zones where PPA wasn’t available. But overall, this was a feature that could take a lot of the pain out of driving congested highways in a city like Beijing.
JiYue is a joint venture between Geely and Baidu, which is a huge Chinese Internet service company and China’s largest map provider. Geely owns 51% and Baidu 49% of the company. The PPA software was a special free promotion at the time of the show but is otherwise around 49,900 RMB (£5,500) to buy outright or 990 RMB (£110) a month to rent.
The focus on autonomous driving with JiYue and other companies at Auto China 2024 underlines the key thing about the Chinese car market: it is very clearly about technology. In Europe we’re a bit more ambivalent, accusing EVs of being “iPads on wheels”. In China, that’s not a slur, it’s what the car buying public actually wants. It’s likely we will change our ways as the EV haters and anti-tech luddites die out. But as we do, China will have been there for years already.
Discussion about this post