Companies / Baidu Apollo Go
Robotaxi operator
Baidu Apollo Go
State of play as of
Baidu’s robotaxi service, the most widely deployed Chinese autonomous ride-hailing operation abroad, now running supervised road tests in London.
Apollo Go (萝卜快跑) is Baidu’s robotaxi service and the most widely deployed Chinese autonomous ride-hailing operation outside China. Through 2026 it pushed its Apollo self-driving stack into markets Western robotaxi programs have mostly stayed home from: Switzerland with the country’s largest bus operator, Kazakhstan as a first Chinese move into Central Asia, a Hong Kong driverless permit, and now supervised road tests in London, arriving inside ride-hailing apps people already use rather than building demand from zero. The open questions are how much of the driving is really the car versus a human backstop, a gap a 2026 fleet-wide stall in Wuhan made concrete, and the same ceiling that caps every Chinese autonomy program, the size of chip it can put in the car. We track where Apollo Go goes, what it claims for scale, and where the caveats sit, with dates and sources.
Fast facts
- What it is
- Apollo Go (萝卜快跑) is Baidu’s robotaxi service, the commercial ride-hailing arm of its Apollo autonomous-driving program.
- Parent
- Baidu (百度), which builds the Apollo self-driving stack the service runs on.
- Reported scale
- Baidu says Apollo Go operates in 27 cities (as of May 2026) and has completed more than 22 million rides (as of April 2026). The figures are the company’s own.Baidu figures, via CAD
- Vehicle
- The purpose-built Apollo RT6, the car used in the London tests, run with a safety operator on board.via CAD
- Overseas markets
- Beyond mainland China: Hong Kong, Switzerland, Kazakhstan and now London. Baidu says it is testing on three continents.via CAD
- Autonomy today
- New markets launch supervised, with a safety operator on board or remote; the company’s account is that one operator can oversee dozens of vehicles.via CAD
The state of play
Apollo Go began supervised public-road robotaxi testing in London through FREENOW, the European ride-hailing platform Lyft owns, its first road testing in the British capital and, Baidu said, the first time a Chinese self-driving vehicle has done real-world testing in London traffic. The fleet uses the Apollo RT6 with a safety operator on board, starts in the borough of Brent, and paid rides are not planned until 2027. London is Apollo Go’s second right-hand-drive market and the car arrives inside an app people already use rather than as a standalone Baidu service. The timing was the story: the same week the US added foreign advanced robots to the FCC Covered List, London opened its streets to a Chinese robotaxi carried in by an American-owned platform.
Apollo Go took a Hong Kong driverless permit on 23 July and, by Baidu’s own account, became the first platform to run fully driverless tests in a right-hand-drive market, days before the London launch and, unlike London, with no safety operator in the car. The reason it matters is the map: right-hand-drive covers more than 70 countries and about two billion people, close to a third of the world, and every Western robotaxi program has stayed left-hand-drive at home. Clearing a right-hand-drive city is what opens that market to a Chinese autonomy stack.
Baidu signed an MoU to bring Apollo Go to Kazakhstan, the first Chinese autonomous ride service to enter Central Asia, inked with the local Turlov Private Holding ahead of the World AI Conference. It is exploratory for now, with no launch timetable or city named. It is the same corridor China’s cars and chargers already run down, with autonomy following the road freight. Baidu put the operation at 27 cities and more than 22 million rides at the time, the figures it repeats across markets.
Apollo Go started driverless road tests in Switzerland with PostBus, the country’s largest bus operator, running an AmiGo service around Lake Constance and the Alpine foothills and targeting regular commercial operation in 2027. The robotaxi export story usually runs through the Middle East; a European public-transit operator handing route coverage to a Chinese autonomy stack is a different kind of validation.
On the evening of 31 March, multiple Apollo Go vehicles froze simultaneously on Wuhan’s elevated ring roads, stranding passengers for up to about two hours and blocking lanes until police and company crews moved the cars. Wuhan police called it a system malfunction; the network-disruption explanation came from Apollo Go’s own customer-service line, not the authorities, and Baidu disclosed no official root cause. Either way the Chinese-language analysis was pointed: if a single network outage cost every connected vehicle its "brain" at once, with no fallback for basic functions like pulling over safely, the fleet could not operate independently of its cloud connection. It is the concrete case against the scale story, and it sits behind every "one operator watches dozens of cars" claim.
Our reporting on Baidu Apollo Go
- The Other Direction
Baidu’s Apollo Go began supervised public-road robotaxi tests in London through FREENOW, the Lyft-owned platform, its first road testing in the British capital and second right-hand-drive market after Hong Kong, the same week the US added foreign advanced robots to the FCC Covered List.
- The Trade-Down
An IDC survey found 47 percent of large US firms now run a Chinese model in at least one use case, and at one point mid-July all five top models on OpenRouter were Chinese. Coinbase, DoorDash, Airbnb and Cursor are named adopters, switching to cut the bill as UBS puts Chinese API prices at 10 to 20 percent of the US alternative.
- The Third Dimension
A Beijing company, Meshy, raised close to 400 million dollars to turn a sentence into a 3D model, the largest raise the AI 3D-generation field has seen. The same issue tracked Apollo Go’s move into Kazakhstan, the first Chinese robotaxi service in Central Asia.
- Year One
SenseTime told a WAIC forum it had turned the gross margin on its domestic-chip inference business positive, with daily token throughput up roughly 25x through 2026. The same issue tracked Apollo Go’s expansion into Kazakhstan.
- The Base Layer
A viral 397-billion-parameter open model billed as Brazil’s own turned out to be a Chinese open-weight base in a costume. The same issue tracked Apollo Go’s Swiss road tests with the transit operator PostBus.
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Common questions
What is Baidu Apollo Go?
Apollo Go (萝卜快跑) is Baidu’s robotaxi service, the commercial ride-hailing arm of its Apollo autonomous-driving program. It runs autonomous ride-hailing in cities across mainland China and expanded abroad through 2026. Baidu says it operates in 27 cities and has completed more than 22 million rides, which would make it the most widely deployed Chinese robotaxi operation outside China. Those scale figures are the company’s own.
Where does Apollo Go operate?
Apollo Go runs robotaxi services in cities across mainland China and, through 2026, expanded into Hong Kong (a driverless permit), Switzerland (road tests with the transit operator PostBus), Kazakhstan (the first Chinese robotaxi in Central Asia) and London (supervised public-road tests via the Lyft-owned platform FREENOW). Baidu says it is testing on three continents.
Who is Apollo Go’s London partner, and is it driverless there?
Apollo Go began supervised public-road testing in London in late July 2026 through FREENOW, the European ride-hailing platform Lyft owns. The trial starts in the borough of Brent with a safety operator on board, and paid passenger rides are not planned until 2027. It is Apollo Go’s second right-hand-drive market after a Hong Kong permit earlier the same month. It is a supervised test, not a driverless launch.
Is Apollo Go actually fully driverless, and is it safe?
In new overseas markets Apollo Go launches supervised, with a safety operator on board or remote, and Baidu’s account is that one operator can oversee dozens of vehicles. The clearest caveat came in March 2026, when a fleet of Apollo Go cars froze simultaneously on Wuhan’s elevated ring roads, stranding passengers; police called it a system malfunction while the company’s own support line blamed a network outage, and analysts read the episode as evidence the cars could not operate without their cloud connection. The driving is largely the car, with a human meant to catch what it misses.
How does Apollo Go compare to Waymo?
Waymo is the strongest US robotaxi operator but runs in a handful of American cities and has barely left the country. Apollo Go, by Baidu’s account, is testing on three continents and reads as a distribution play more than a sensor one: it arrives inside ride-hailing apps people already use, such as the Lyft-owned FREENOW in London, rather than building demand from zero. Both are ultimately capped by the same input, the size and supply of the chip a carmaker can put in the vehicle.
Every dated fact above traces to a named source, and where it comes from our reporting, to the dated issue that carried it. Where a claim is self-reported or disputed, we say so.