New facilities for intelligent vehicles

Visitors test intelligent connected vehicles at the National Intelligent Connected Vehicle Testing Demonstration Base in Shanghai on June 7. [Photo provided to China Daily]

China's first national-level demonstration base to test intelligent connected cars opened in Shanghai on June 7, signalling that the sector has entered into a new phase in the country.

The National Intelligent Connected Vehicle Testing Demonstration Base will help facilitate research and development, standards studies and policy formulation, as well as testing and certifying connected vehicle technology in China.

It has full access to Wi-Fi, LTE-Vehicle and dedicated short range communications.

The base, developed by the Shanghai International Automobile City, is expected to cover 100 square kilometers through three to five years of road experiments.

The facility supports 29 demonstration and testing programs, including vehicle collision alert, brake alert and pedestrian crossing alert. The figure will surge to 100 by the end of 2017.

"With the development of science and technology, the time of intelligent connected vehicles is coming," said Rong Wenwei, general manager of Shanghai International Automobile City.

"The development of intelligent connected vehicles in the United States, Europe and Japan is mainly pushed by their governments. The Chinese government will set up a good environment for the development and rapid application of intelligent connected vehicles."

Experts said intelligent connected vehicle and pilotless automobile experiments will go through four phases in China.

The first phase is being conducted in the Jiading Auto Expo Park and Tongji University Jiading Campus; the second phase is open road testing; the third is to expand the experimental area to the typical city integration pilot zone from 2018 to the end of 2019; and the final phase is to build a real demonstration city in Shanghai by 2020.

Together with the demonstration base, two other facilities started operations on the same day: the Standardization Test and Research Base for Intelligent Connected Vehicles and the Standard Research Center of the China Alliance for Intelligent and Connected Vehicles.

Experts say the standardization test and research base is expected to be the cradle for China's future intelligent connected vehicles.