DiDi Autonomous Driving Launches DeepHorizon Lab, Partners with Tsinghua to Advance End-to-End Autonomous Driving

DiDi Autonomous Driving recently established the "DiDi Voyager Labs" and has initiated in-depth industry-academia-research collaboration with Professor Li Shengbo's research group at Tsinghua University. The partnership will focus on cutting-edge areas such as multimodal large models, world models, and reinforcement learning to drive breakthroughs and industrial implementation of multimodal end-to-end autonomous driving technologies. Operating under a model of "physical operations + shared resources + joint R&D," the lab will establish a unified technical roadmap and engineering framework to create a new integrated paradigm linking research, engineering, and commercialization. The collaboration will also cultivate high-caliber, interdisciplinary AI talent through a joint training mechanism and advance original technology development driven by real-world industrial needs. DiDi launched its autonomous driving R&D efforts in 2016 and spun it off into an independent company in 2019. To date, the company has obtained public road testing permits in Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou, Hefei, Guangzhou, and California, USA, and has been awarded some of China’s first demonstration application licenses for intelligent connected vehicles.