BEIJING — Beijing has built a new self-driving vehicle test base to advance the application of the technology, Beijing Evening News reported on June 4.

The base is called Apollo Park and covers an area of 13,500 square meters in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area in the southeast suburbs. It has been configured with more than 200 self-driving test vehicles with featured functions as well as accessories storage, cloud control of remote big data, network operations, maintenance and calibration, and also development and testing facilities.

The base is expected to accelerate the application of self-driving technology.

The city issued detailed regulations for the testing of autonomous vehicles in December last year. The regulations gave the green light to road tests for self-driving vehicles carrying passengers.

For safety reasons, test vehicles must have self-driving data recorders and an emergency system that allows a human driver to manually override the automated driving system, the regulations stipulate.

According to a government plan, test spaces for intelligent connected vehicles in the capital are expected to reach 500 square km by 2022, and a total of 2,000 km of roads are expected to open for testing.