Zooming toward 'golden inflection point of growth'

Autonomous driving industry rides tech and policies to a bright future

Roads and highways full of vehicles but minus emissions, traffic snarls and stressed-out drivers — this futuristic vision is materializing in China slowly but surely as the country's autonomous driving industry is on the verge of a golden period of development, company executives and experts said.

Policies, they said, are becoming increasingly clearer and open; technologies such as artificial intelligence and their applications like algorithms are becoming more powerful; and, what's more, costs of crucial components such as lidar are going down.

All these augur well for the healthy and robust development of the industry and commercialization of its products and technologies. So do a slew of policies rolled out recently to regulate the development of autonomous driving in the world's largest vehicle market.