Alibaba Made An Internet-Connected Car That Will Pay For Gas All By Itself

Alibaba is the place you go when you need to buy a few thousand Guy Fawkes masks for your next Anonymous meeting, or maybe a few kilos of tantalum bars to forge your own smart phone. It’s a diverse online market. Alibaba went public back in 2014, amassed billions, and earned the nickname The Amazon of China. Now they’re ready to take over everything from the dancing robot market to the car market. Alibaba is releasing a new SUV called the Roewe RX5. On the surface, the RX5 seems like a pretty standard SUV. Under the dashboard, the RX5 is closer to HAL 9000 than your average car.

The RX5 features an onboard YunOS that will run independently from all your other smart devices. The OS will be able to control any other device that is connected to it. Pull up to a gas station — the OS will pay automatically. Pull into your driveway — the OS will turn on the A/C in your house. Drive around — a committed drone will shadow you the whole way. Wait, what?

Evidently, the car comes with a drone that will follow your car. CEO Daniel Zhang of Alibaba claims that “the location of the car is the command” for the drone to follow. However, CEO Zhang does not elaborate on why the car needs a drone shadowing it, other than to gather and report information back to the YunOS. Okay. Let’s hope that’s end-to-end encrypted.

The YunOS system is direct competition for Google’s Android Auto and Apple’s CarPlay with one major advantage — you don’t need an Android or iPhone (or any smart device for that matter) to operate Alibaba’s RX5’s YunOS. Now, we just need to figure out a way for the YunOS to queue up Netflix, pour a Dalwhinnie 15, and pop some corn when we pull in the driveway.

(via Mashable)

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