Beijing gave the long-awaited go-ahead to Baidu to conduct open-road tests for its autonomous vehicles, days after a self-driving Uber car failed to slow down and killed a 49-year-old woman in the U.S. Baidu is the only company to receive the first batch of five number plates to conduct the trial. The Beijing-based company has been tasked to spearhead the development of self-driving cars and is seeking to build the vehicular equivalent of the Android operating system for smartphones.

Beijing joins Shanghai in allowing car companies to test their self-driving vehicles under real-world traffic conditions, a step that is crucial to calibrate the responses of the cars. Before this, car companies have tested their vehicles on closed circuits or in very secluded areas where there are few if any cars and pedestrians, to minimize the potential for accidents. Autonomous driving is one of the areas where China and the U.S. are competing for leadership. Self-driving cars are increasingly seen as an amalgamation of the latest technologies, including 5G, manufacturing, new energy, and applied technology, because they must prove to be safe in sometimes chaotic, unpredictable real-world conditions.

In December, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) unveiled a three-year plan making the development of smart cars a national priority. Underpinned by artificial intelligence (AI), the backbone technology driving the so-called fourth industrial revolution, autonomous driving is expected to generate USD7 trillion in market value by 2050, according to Intel. In Beijing, Baidu will be testing level-three autonomous car technology that allows vehicles to take full control under certain operating conditions, one notch higher than Tesla’s Autopilot function. Level five autonomy would be fully self-driving cars from point-to-point under all conditions without human intervention, the South China Morning Post reports.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) expects vehicles with some autonomous functions to account for half of new vehicles sold in the country by 2020.