Shanghai (ZXZC)- Chinese automaker Changan Automobile has decided to invest RMB 1.6 billion in intelligent-connect vehicle (ICV) area and grasped around 20 key technologies in autonomous driving modes and technical architecture, such as data fusion, planning and decision-making as well as the controlling of execution, according to local media.

From 2018 to 2020, the automaker will continue to complete its R&D layouts and foster the R&D in vehicle intelligentization. Besides, it aims to expand its autonomous vehicle R&D team to 2,000 staff in the next decade with a total investment up to RMB 20 billion.

In the past several years, Changan Automobile has attained quite a few achievements in autonomous driving domain. In 2016, a Changan Ruicheng completed a 2,000-km autonomous driving trip from Chongqing to Beijing, which was the China’s first long-distance autonomous vehicle testing drive. Last year, a Changan CS55, equipped with a L4 autonomous driving system dubbed APA6.0, had performed its first testing drive in China.

Meanwhile, Changan Automobile has obtained licenses to test its autonomous vehicles on roads in California and Chengdu, a southwestern city in China. It is also a member of Chinese internet giant Baidu's Apollo plan, which aims to provide open, comprehensive and reliable software for the development of autonomous vehicles. At Auto China 2018 in Beijing, the new CS75, the company’s first model carrying L2 automatic parking system, officially went on sale.

The automaker plans to mass produce the CS55 in the second half of this year, which features a L2 autonomous driving core technology dubbed IACC (integrated adapted cruise control). Reportedly, the IACC integrates various functional systems, such as full-speed adaptive cruise control (ACC), lane departure Warning (LDW), traffic sign recognition (TSR) and pedestrian recognition, etc., and has reached the Level 2 in accordance with NHTSA’s (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) definition to vehicle automation.