Jidu Auto, an electric vehicle partnership between China’s technology giant Baidu and Oriental auto maker Geely, intends to plough 50 billion yuan ($7.7 billion) in to producing smart cars on the subsequent five decades, its chief executive told Reuters.

Xia Yiping said on Friday that the financing would result in Baidu and different shareholders and Jidu would like to establish its own initial electric vehicle (EV) in 3 decades, as would be standard to the business, but might create efforts to speed up up.

Its very first EV would seem to be a”robot” and might aim young clients, Xia said, adding Jidu would crawl big-market data before selecting your last version.

“it’ll make you really feel as it’s really a robot which could keep in touch with you personally with emotions,” said Xia, that co-founded and functioned as chief technology officer in bike-sharing firm Mobike before it had been acquired by Meituan at 2018.

Baidu’s Hong Kong-listed stocks jumped up to 1.34percent after Reuters reported Jidu’s investment program.

The initiation of the newest automobile business in January comes as technology organizations across the globe are rushing to create intelligent cars after Tesla’s victory in commercializing EVs.

Jidu intends to produce a brand new version each or two years after its original launching, Xia said, without even sacrificing a sales target. It intends to employ 2,500 to 3,000 people over 2 to three decades, for example 400 to 500 pc software engineers.

Shanghai and Beijing established Jidu also intends to rollout its branding at the thirdquarter of 2021, Xia reported.

Xia said Jidu, that’ll utilize Geely’s open electric electric vehicle platform, expects to create cars in Hangzhou Bay from China’s eastern city of Ningbo, where Geely has a few plants.

It intends to market its own car directly to clients to start with, without the need for dealerships.

Chinese internet search engine company Baidu at January announced it could prepare the company with Zhejiang Geely Holding Group to leverage its clever driving experience and Geely’s car manufacturing capacities. Baidu now possesses 55 percent of Jidu and Geely features a 45{4298251308cd288b939effe95b4c029e39df70679b4587e1449e43e4b08368d8} stake.

Jidu is thinking about using processors designed by Baidu, that has through time developed smart automobile engineering including autonomous driving, highdefinition cloud and maps. Baidu first launched its own autonomous driving unit Apollo at 20 17.

smart-phone manufacturer Xiaomi Corp along with telecom giant Huawei Technologies are just one of other Chinese technology giants harbouring automobile aspirations.