Baidu plans to put a driverless bus on Chinese roads next year and cars by 2021

Chinese search giant Baidu has some bold new targets for its self-driving auto plans.

Baidu CEO Robin Li outlined company's self-driving vehicle goals for the next few years onstage at the Wall Street Journal’s D.Live technology conference, touting a plan to roll out driverless busses in China next year, semi-autonomous vehicles by 2019, and fully autonomous cars by 2021.

Li also revealed that Baidu spends about $1.5 billion on self-driving R&D efforts annually, which amounts to about 15 percent of the company's revenue.

The driverless bus will be manufactured by an unnamed Chinese bus maker, with plans to run one predetermined route when its ready for service. Baidu will partner with Chinese automaker BAIC Motor to make the self-driving vehicles, since the tech company has focused primarily on developing its autonomous platform, rather than actually making cars.

Baidu's aggressive plans will likely depend in part on the rapid development of the Apollo autonomous program, an open-source self-driving platform the company launched earlier this year. Baidu counts some of the biggest names in the tech and auto industries as partners in the program, like Ford, Daimler, Nvidia, Intel, and Microsoft. The companies hope to create a platform that will be easily adoptable for automakers through collaboration by pooling research and data.

Li positioned the Apollo program as a more inclusive alternative to privately-developed platforms from competitors like Waymo, which creates its own software (and hardware) and likely plans to market its platform as an aftermarket self-driving solution to automakers.

Apollo began this year, but Baidu has been publicly working on its self-driving tech since 2015. The company has grabbed attention even in the West with showy demonstrations of the platform that have sometimes bordered on reckless, like when its engineers allegedly jumped out in front of a moving car and when Li took an illegal, livestreamed autonomous ride to a company conference.