The US-centric nature of much of the analysis of the connected car industry means it is often portrayed as a showdown between Motor City and Silicon Valley in the US, forgetting that a great deal of the innovation is happening in Asia. It is China’s search giant Baidu which has launched the most comprehensive attempt yet to provide a unified reference platform for autonomous driving. Of course, given the state of trade and technology rivalry between the US and China, its dreams of global adoption are unlikely to come true. The US is increasingly a large hole in the Chinese commercial map, just as China is for otherwise global firms like Google. But Baidu’s Project Apollo may help to accelerate…