In October last year, the government of Shanghai City issued the “the regulation of test and demonstration of intelligent connected vehicles” to prepare for the commercialization of autonomous driving technology in the metropolitan area in the future. The aim of that regulation is: autonomous driving vehicles with L4 or above technology can be realized for the commercialized application in designated areas and scenarios from 2025. After just one year, the city government issued the “the program of the implementation of C-V2X innovate application (from 2023 to 2025)”. At the same time, Jiading District, Shanghai proposed the “unmanned zone” autonomous driving demonstration experience zone in the end of September this year; Meanwhile, the 5th generation autonomous driving car – Apollo Moon (there are versions including Arcfox, Weltmeister, and Aion) introduced by Baidu’s Apollo autonomous driving platform that cooperates with many self-owned brands respectively will begin the autonomous driving mobility services in Jiading District, which utilizes safety mechanisms including single-vehicle intelligence, redundancy monitoring, parallel driving (it utilizes the 5G connection to integrate people, cars, roads, clouds into one virtual world that is parallel with the real transportation world, so the transportation will be safer and more efficient via the monitoring of road and vehicle data by the cloud platform), the operation of autonomous driving, and C-V2X, etc., to ensure the driving safety of fully-autonomous driving. This also realized the significant breakthrough of the applications of autonomous driving in scenarios including “heavy traffic flow, high dynamic, high complexity”. So far, Shanghai City had opened 1,800 kilometers roads for test; Moreover, the target of the whole city is to build more than 800 kilometers of intelligent highways and urban roads (including expressways), more than 500 intelligent road intersections. In addition, they will also build more than 100 intelligent public parking lots. To view from these contents of plans, current situation of promotion, and the near-term targets, Shanghai City government’s determination and the execution capability of fully promotion on the autonomous driving and intelligent transportation will raise the transportation infrastructures and the mobility efficiency of this super city to a whole new level.
When intelligent driving technology above L2 begin being applied to every newly introduced car model, it will actually be the best timing to begin to change the appearances and traffic situations of cities. For Taiwan, this timing has already come. Now, Shanghai that had 10 times more of the traffic flow and the complexity of road network than any city in Taiwan had begun conducting it, so should the MoTC, the MoEA, the NSTC, start to form a project team to invite the industry and the academic to cooperate and then choose one city for pilot run of demonstration plan? However, we should know that the transformation and upgrade of urban transportation is a long-term development target, so that we can’t get the permanent cure if we only pay attention to short-term results; The social value of intelligent connected technology can be fully revealed only if the points of view of the government and the society are unanimous and had reached the consensus for the long-term vision.