Byton Cooperates with Aurora to Put 100-200 Automatic Driving Cars in San Francisco

Byton announced a reach strategic cooperation with Aurora, an automatic driving technology company. In the next two years, Byton and Aurora will carry out pilot projects, jointly develop automatic driving technology on Byton cars and will deploy 100 to 200 automatic driving vehicles in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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In addition, the two sides will further explore how to apply the Aurora automatic driving system in Byton’s mass-produced cars. According to the automatic driving standard issued by Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), L4 level automatic driving is highly automated. In most cases, all driving operations can be performed by the system alone – only certain circumstances require drivers to intervene.

“Byton was born for the automatic driving era. We are pleased to partner with Aurora, which is popularizing safe and fast automatic driving around the globe, and improving people’s travel experience,” said Bi Fukang, Byton CEO and co-founder.

Bi said the autopilot is not an isolated technology, but a complete internal experience. Byton began targeted interaction design in cars, such as a 1.25-meter full-screen control panel and touch screen for the driver, rotatable front seats and a digital open cloud platform named Byton Life.

Byton released its first model, Byton Concept, at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in early January. It also announced it would design and produce intelligent luxury electric cars for consumers in China, the US and Europe. Its first model was scheduled to be unveiled in China in 2019, and then in the European and American markets in 2020.

Byton said, it would be both pragmatic and forward-looking in its automatic driving. The first mass-produced cars will be equipped with a Byton L3 level automatic driving solution, which was independently researched and developed by Byton. The company is promoting a strategic cooperation with the world’s top automobile parts suppliers. “We will take advantage of the mature technology accumulated by autopilot test data so as to ensure the reliability and security of the technology,” Bi said.

Byton said it would cooperate with Aurora in L4 to improve security and achieve an even higher level of autopilot technology.

Public records show that Aurora was co-founded by three experts in autopilot development. The founders are pioneers in automatic driving.

Chris Urmson (CEO) led the automatic driving research and development project at the Google X laboratory and served as CTO of Waymo. He has a doctorate in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Sterling Anderson (CPO) led the design, development and launch of the Tesla Model X. He was the head of autopilot development in Tesla and has a doctorate in robotics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Drew Bagnell (CTO), as founder of the Uber Advanced Technology Center, led Uber’s autopilot and perception team. He is one of the founding members of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and has a doctorate in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.