Baidu CEO wants China to subsidise development of autonomous cars and private spaceflight capabilities

Baidu CEO Robin Li wants help from China to become like Elon Musk. Over fears of China getting left behind in the technological race, Li wants subsidies and regulations from the government to encourage the development of autonomous cars and private spaceflight capabilities, according to a report in Bloomberg. Baidu is competing with Uber and Waymo to commercialise self-driving vehicles. China is the biggest car market in the world, and has set a goal to achieve 10 to 20 percent autonomous vehicles on its roads by the year 2025. Robin Li has indicated that while emerging economies around the world have regulations suitable for development of new technologies, China does not really have measures in place that encourage research in self driving cars. Baidu has a self-driving car division in Silicon Valley, in partnership with Nvidia. The company hopes to introduce autonomous cars in China by 2018, ahead of mass production plans in 2021. Future Mobility, backed by Chinese tech giant Tencent, wants to introduce autonomous vehicles in China by 2020 . Future Mobility hopes to introduce completely self driving cars. LeEco wants to introduce cars that are essentially free, with revenue generated from in car content and other services. The LeSEE car prototype was unveiled by LeEco last year at a press event in San Francisco , and made an inauspicious entry as the car did not drive down to the stage by itself, as intended. LeEco has invested in another electric car startup, Faraday Future .