Alibaba finally launches its own smart car and car OS

Since Alibaba first said that it was working on a smart car with Chinese auto manufacturer SAIC, I’ve been dying to see what the final product would look like. The answer, as it turns out, is like this.

The vehicle above is Alibaba and SAIC’s first smart car, the CarOS Roewe RX5. If it looks familiar, that’s because SAIC started showing off the car earlier this year. But now we know that the car sports a sexy touchscreen dashboard and will run a version of Alibaba’s YunOS that supports some voice control features.

Details of the RX5 interior

Alibaba says that the car will leverage the company’s ecommerce services to help drivers search for things like parking spaces and gas stations, and then submit the required payments electronically. It will also assign each driver a unique ID and then make recommendations for things like music and restaurants, or set the car’s air temperature to the user’s favorite.

The car also comes with detachable 360-degree cameras that, Alibaba says, are good for “recording trips – and selfies.”

That’s right, the car of the future is here and it wants to encourage your narcissistic selfie addiction.

As for the cost, SAIC says that the price will start at US$22,300. If you’re in, you can preorder the vehicle on Tmall right now, and more than 100 people have already taken Alibaba up on that offer.

The launch was a big enough deal to Alibaba that founder Jack Ma was on the scene himself to introduce the vehicle to the Chinese press. And it’s clear that Alibaba is thinking big when it comes to this kind of tech. “In the future, we hope Internet-connected cars to be a solid foundation for the development of smarter transportation and smarter cities,” said YunOS president Zhang Chunhui in a statement.

“Smart operating systems become the second engine of cars, while data is the new fuel,” gushed Alibaba Technology Steering Committee chair Wang Jian.

That might be overstating it – if you try to gas up your RX5 with gigabytes you’re going to be deeply disappointed – but Alibaba obviously wants to place itself at the center of car-based data services. To that end, its YunOS car system will be open to other companies and third-party developers who will, Alibaba hopes, bring all sorts of new services onto the platform.