The company has hired Uber's Charlie Miller, best known for his remote control Jeep hack (and plenty of Apple device hacks before that), to head up its safety and security work on self-driving cars. He'll make sure that intruders can't compromise your ride, to put it succinctly. Didi has also scored some engineers from Alphabet's Waymo, one of which (Jia Zhaoyin) will be a principal engineer.

It wasn't a secret that Didi was interested in driverless cars, but the creation of the lab makes it official. And setting up shop in the US is as much a declaration of its commitment to self-driving tech as it is a practical move. Didi maybe relatively late to the party, but it's determined to catch up quickly.