Chongqing- An academician-led team will build an intelligent connected vehicle (ICV) innovation center in the Western (Chongqing) Science City, boosting the tens of billions of ICV industry clusters in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, according to the Western (Chongqing) Science City on May 25. 

As a leading scholar of automotive intelligence, Li Keqiang is the academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor at the School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University. Now he is in charge of the State Key Laboratory of Automotive Safety and Energy and the National Intelligent Connected Vehicle Innovation Center. 

Recently, the Western (Chongqing) Science City and Li's team have completed the contract's signing. According to the agreement, Li's team will focus on key components and technologies, intelligent connected vehicle evaluation, and others, to build tens of billions of intelligent connected vehicle industry clusters within five years, forming a new highland for the intelligent connected automobile industry in China. 

Aiming at emerging industries of automotive electronics, new energy, and intelligent connected vehicles, software, and information, the project's launch will provide technical support and industrial resources for Chongqing's intelligent networked vehicle industry and empower local firms' intelligent connected transformation. It will boost Chongqing to enter the first tier of the national intelligent connected vehicle industry. The industry's overall development level will reach the domestic leading and international first-class level. 

The incorporation of Li's team mirrors the automobile industry's transformation and upgrading of the Western (Chongqing) Science City. In recent years, it has worked on the important parts of the intelligent connected new energy vehicles, highlighting the research and development of the essential sectors, like automotive electronics, motors, automotive software, etc. 

Since 2020, a total of 16 automobile-related projects have settled in the core area of the science city with a contractual investment of 28.44 billion yuan (about 4.26 billion U.S. dollars), covering sectors such as automotive software, automatic driving, and car networking. 

In the first quarter of 2022, the Chongqing Automotive Software Innovation Research Platform of the Chinese Academy of Sciences settled in the Western (Chongqing) Science City with an investment of about 5 billion yuan. This project will resolve the bottlenecks of the automotive software supply chain and carry out automotive software research.

"While improving the industrial ecology, we are also speeding up the creation of demonstration application scenarios for ICVs," said an official. Currently, the Western (Chongqing) Science City has opened 42 kilometers of autonomous driving test roads in the region and introduced leading self-driving companies such as Baidu Apollo. Next, it will accelerate the speed of the self-driving test roads opening to achieve the core area of 355 kilometers of road available. 

(Wang Yuxuan, as an intern, also contributed to this report.)