Mubasher: Henry Liu, chief scientist for smart transportation initiatives at Chinese Didi Chuxing, on Tuesday revealed that his company is seeking to become one of the front-runners in developing self-driving cars.

The Chinese ride-hailing giant has been working to develop autonomous vehicle technologies for three years, and has US- and China-based teams, according to CNBC, citing Liu as saying.

“We already have autonomous vehicles being equipped with our sensors and we have licenses in both Mountain View, California, as well as in Beijing, China,” Liu  said on the sidelines of East Tech West conference in Guangzhou, China.

“We'll be one of the front-runners in terms of the autonomous vehicle technology development,” he added.

Self-driving vehicles are attracting millions of dollars in investments from automakers and internet companies, with expectations that the widespread adoption of these vehicles will pick up in 2021 or 2022.

Driverless cars will need a very high-speed mobile internet connection, which China is currently developing very aggressively and outspent the US since 2015.

Didi's major advantage in developing self-driving and smart cars is that it has a massive transportation network with 550 million users, taking an average of 30 million rides every day across more than 400 cities, that allows the firm to collect plenty of data, according to Liu.

“We can also predict in terms of what's going to happen in the next 15 to 30 minutes, in terms of traffic flows,” Liu noted.

Generally, artificial intelligence (AI) systems require large volumes of so-called training data to learn patterns and behaviors.

Didi is one of China's most valuable start-ups, backed by major names including Apple, Alibaba and SoftBank, with valuation reached $56 billion, according to CB Insights.