A testing field for autonomous driving in Anji county, Huzhou, East China's Zhejiang province. [Photo/WeChat account: huzhoufabu]

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently greenlighted the construction of a national pilot area for the internet of vehicles in Huzhou's Deqing county.

This will be the first national level IoV pilot area based in a county-level area in China.

Deqing has been tasked to coordinate the development of IoV, 5G, smart city and smart transportation in the county, develop mapping services for auto driving based on the Beidou Navigation Satellite System, explore institutional innovations and formulate replicable measures.

Deqing has built Zhejiang's first closed test field for intelligent network connection and the largest vehicle-road collaborative network in China.

The county is now fully covered by 5G network and high-precision geographic information network.

Last September, Anji, along with Alicloud and Chinese autonomous driving startup Haomo.AI, unveiled China's first large–scale automatic driving scenario database developed based on vehicle-road collaborative cloud services, which is believed to have accelerated the development of autonomous driving in the nation.