"We will make the safest vehicle in the world," Stella Li, president of BYD Motors and senior vice president of BYD company Limited, told Xinhua.
Other Chinese companies, including Chery Automobile, Baic Motor Corporation as well as Internet company LeTV also unveiled cars with self-driving functions early this year.
In April, two self-driving cars vehicles, produced by Chang'an Automobile, wrapped up a 2,000-km journey in China's first long-distance road test for autonomous vehicles. The maximum speed of the cars reached 120 kilometers per hour. The company plans to put driverless cars into commercial use in 2018.
Baidu, China's largest search engine provider, also has big plans for self-driving cars. The online search company debuted its driverless car last year and generated a lot of excitement when it successfully completed a rigorous road test in Beijing in December. The company is aiming to commercialize the driverless technology by 2018 and to achieve mass production of the cars by 2020.
One of the biggest challenge is to make self-driving cars as safe as possible under all conditions. Many tech companies are moving in this direction.
Mobileye, the Israeli technology company helping power Tesla and other carmakers' autonomous driving technologies, said that it has worked with China' s Research Institute of Highway Ministry of Transport to test the company's collision avoidance technology on commercial vehicles.
The company also announced that it teams up with BMW Group and Intel to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021.
Many experts in this field agree future self-driving technology could save numerous lives in vehicle accidents involving human errors. According to US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), there are around 32,500 traffic fatalities that occurred on US roads in 2015 with 94 percent of those attributable to driver choices and human error.
But the road to self-driving cars isn' t just about technology. Public also need to understand and learn the limitations of the current technologies. Currently, features such as Tesla's Autopilot is a driver assistance system, and a damned good one, but it's not a driver replacement system.
Recent incidents involving Tesla's autopilot function also raise questions about whether these partially autonomous technologies should be fielded before full government regulation.
The U.S. government seems will not abandon efforts to speed the development of self-driving car. Local media quoted Mark Rosekind, head of NHTSA, as saying that and the agency is bullish on the potential of autonomous driving technology.
