The tech giant also wants to court the business crowd. It's introducing an Apollo Enterprise bundle of products that court large-scale needs, whether it's hands-free highway driving, map services or autonomous parking valets. You might not recognize it at a glance, but you'll recognize the partners -- Baidu is working to roll the feature into cars from Ford, Hyundai Kia, BYD, Chery, Great Wall and WM Motor.

To round things out, Baidu has opened up the source code for the framework that helps connected cars talk to each other, traffic lights and other city infrastructure. The hope, as you might imagine, is that Baidu's tech might become a common language in the connected car world. That could be helpful for automakers that don't have the resources to craft their own features.