Apollo Go

Apollo Go, known in China as Luobo Kuaipao (萝卜快跑, roughly "radish run"), is the robotaxi service operated by Baidu. It grew out of Apollo, the open autonomous driving platform that Baidu launched in 2017, and it has become one of the largest commercial autonomous vehicle ride-hailing operations in the world. Passengers hail a driverless car through the Apollo Go app or Baidu Maps, and in most of Baidu's Chinese service areas the cars now run with no safety operator on board.^[2][5]

In its first-quarter 2026 results, Baidu reported that Apollo Go had provided more than 22 million cumulative rides to the public and that its fleet had reached 27 cities across China, the Middle East, and, in testing, Europe.^[7] Baidu's earnings materials and third-party comparisons place Apollo Go alongside Alphabet's Waymo as one of the two robotaxi services running at the largest scale, and Fast Company named it, with Waymo, among the leading robotaxi operators on its 2026 Most Innovative Companies list.^[7]

Its growth has also drawn scrutiny. A rapid 2024 expansion in Wuhan, where fares undercut human drivers and a fleet of several hundred cars ran around the clock, set off a public debate in China about automation and lost jobs.^[8]

The Apollo platform

Baidu announced Apollo in April 2017 as an open platform for self-driving cars. Rather than build and sell vehicles itself, the company said it would give partners a stack that combined a vehicle reference platform, hardware, open-source software, and cloud data services, and would make much of the technology freely available to carmakers and suppliers.^[1] Qi Lu, then Baidu's group president and chief operating officer, framed intelligent vehicles as one of the largest near-term opportunities in artificial intelligence.^[1] By opening the stack rather than keeping it proprietary, Baidu positioned Apollo to compete with more developed rivals such as Tesla and Google.^[1]

The company set an aggressive schedule at launch: technology for cars in restricted environments by July 2017, capability for simple urban roads by the end of that year, and fully autonomous driving on highways and open city roads by 2020.^[1] Early automaker partners included BAIC, BYD, and Chery.^[1] Baidu released the platform's software as open source in stages through 2017, with version 1.5 arriving in September 2017.^[2] Baidu also used the platform in the Apolong, a small self-driving shuttle bus built with partners including King Long, which entered production in 2017.^[12] The Apollo stack relies on lidar, cameras and computer vision, and sensor fusion, and it gave Baidu the technical base for a ride-hailing service of its own.

Launch and early operations

Baidu began robotaxi trial operations in Changsha in September 2019, running an initial fleet of 45 vehicles.^[4] Over the following year it extended the service to additional cities and opened Apollo Go to the general public in Beijing in September 2020.^[3] The Beijing rollout put about 40 cars on the road across the Yizhuang, Haidian, and Shunyi districts, with close to 100 pickup and drop-off points, and riders booked through Baidu Maps or the Apollo site.^[3] At the time Baidu said its robotaxi network was the largest in China and that its test fleet had logged more than 500,000 kilometers of road testing in Beijing alone.^[3]

In August 2022, Baidu secured the first permits in China to run fully driverless taxis, with no safety operator in the vehicle, in Wuhan and Chongqing.^[4] That approval let the company move from supervised rides toward unmanned commercial operations, which is where most of its later ride growth came from.

Scale and economics

Apollo Go's scale is documented quarter by quarter in Baidu's earnings reports, which have made robotaxi ride counts a recurring headline metric. The figures below come from Baidu's own disclosures and management commentary.

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The company reached two milestones that changed its cost structure. In June 2024 it said it had transitioned to fully driverless service across essentially all of Wuhan, and by its fourth-quarter 2024 report Baidu's chief executive Robin Li said Apollo Go had "achieved 100% fully driverless operations in China," meaning no safety drivers remained on its Chinese vehicles.^[5][6] Weekly rides peaked at more than 350,000 in March 2026, and cumulative fully driverless mileage climbed accordingly.^[7] By the end of 2024 Baidu reported that its Apollo Go fleets had accumulated more than 130 million autonomous kilometers with what it called an outstanding safety record, a total that passed 330 million by early 2026, including over 220 million kilometers driven with no one in the driver's seat.^[6][7]

Alongside the May 2024 hardware announcements, Baidu unveiled Apollo ADFM (Autonomous Driving Foundation Model), which it described as the world's first foundation model built for Level 4 autonomous driving, part of a shift toward larger deep learning models running the driving stack.^[4]

The Apollo RT6

The Apollo RT6 is Baidu's sixth-generation robotaxi and the vehicle behind much of its cost reduction. Baidu unveiled the RT6 in July 2022 and, at the time, said it expected the car to cost around 250,000 yuan to build.^[9] When the mass-production version arrived in 2024, the price had fallen sharply. On the Q2 2024 earnings call Robin Li said the RT6, equipped with a battery-swapping system, was "competitively priced at below $30,000 for mass production."^[5] Baidu presented the mass-production RT6 as roughly 60 percent cheaper than the previous generation.^[4] Li also said the company had cut Apollo Go's cost per vehicle by more than half compared with a year earlier.^[5] Lower unit cost was central to Baidu's stated goal of reaching unit-economics breakeven in its lead robotaxi markets and steering the business toward profitability.^[5]

The RT6 is designed as a purpose-built robotaxi rather than a retrofitted production car, with driving-system redundancy intended to let it operate without a human backup.^[9] Bringing a car that could be manufactured for under $30,000 into service is what let Baidu expand its driverless fleet quickly without the per-vehicle costs that had constrained earlier generations.

Wuhan operations and the 2024 backlash

Wuhan became Apollo Go's flagship city and, in 2024, the center of a public controversy. After the June 2024 switch to fully driverless service, Baidu said the cars were available to about 9 million residents and ran 24 hours a day.^[5] By mid-2024 the company operated a fleet of roughly 400 to 500 driverless cars in Wuhan and said it aimed to reach 1,000 by the end of the year, in a city served by about 17,000 conventional taxis.^[5][8]

The friction came from price and speed of adoption. Apollo Go fares in Wuhan started as low as 4 yuan (about 55 US cents), against roughly 18 yuan (about $2.48) for a comparable human-driven taxi ride.^[8] The gap alarmed taxi and ride-hail drivers, and the topic spread on Chinese social media. Discussion of the service became the second most-discussed topic on Weibo in one week, with more than 75 million users joining in; one widely shared comment read, "Disrupting the market is the least of their worries. They will steal your rice bowl," and another warned, "Driving schools, road inspectors, and taxis are all going to shut down."^[8]

Safety and traffic complaints added to the reaction. In July 2024 an Apollo Go car collided with a pedestrian at a Wuhan intersection in an incident that circulated widely, and residents complained that the driverless cars sometimes stopped and blocked traffic when they could not resolve a situation.^[8] The episode became a reference point in the wider Chinese debate over how fast to let automation displace low-wage service work.

International expansion

From late 2024, Baidu began taking Apollo Go outside mainland China. In November 2024 the service won a permit to test on open roads in Hong Kong, which Baidu said made it the only company authorized for robotaxi testing there and marked its first entry into a right-hand-drive market.^[6] The company then moved into the Gulf. By early 2026 Apollo Go was running fully driverless operations across multiple zones in Dubai, and it launched a local version of the Apollo Go app there in March 2026, with expansion also announced for Abu Dhabi.^[7][9]

Two partnerships with US ride-hailing firms set up a broader international push. In July 2025 Baidu agreed to deploy Apollo Go vehicles on Uber's platform in markets outside the United States and mainland China.^[2][11] In August 2025 it reached a separate deal with Lyft to supply self-driving cars, built by Jiangling Motors, for service in Germany and Britain starting in 2026.^[9][10] By the first quarter of 2026 Baidu said Apollo Go was on track to begin open-road testing in Switzerland and expected to start testing in London with both Uber and Lyft.^[7]

Competition and context

Apollo Go operates in a crowded Chinese robotaxi field that also includes Pony.ai, WeRide, and the autonomous unit of ride-hailing company DiDi, along with international operators such as Waymo and, formerly, GM's Cruise. Comparisons with Waymo are common because the two operate at similar scale.^[7] Their approaches differ: Waymo has focused on a smaller set of cities, while Apollo Go has emphasized ride volume and low fares in Chinese cities using cheaper, purpose-built vehicles.^[5] Apollo Go's open-platform origins and its low fares are what most distinguish it from Western operators, and its scale has made it a common reference point in debates over the economics and social impact of driverless taxis.

See also

• Baidu
• Autonomous driving
• Waymo
• Pony.ai
• WeRide
• Cruise

References

1. ^Lomas, Natasha. "Baidu open sources its autonomous driving technology as 'Apollo'." TechCrunch, April 18, 2017. techcrunch.com/...baidu-project-apollo
2. ^"Baidu." Wikipedia (Apollo platform and Apollo Go sections), accessed July 2026. en.wikipedia.org/...Baidu
3. ^"Baidu launches Apollo Go robotaxi service in Beijing." IoT Tech News, September 11, 2020. iottechnews.com/...otaxi-service-apollo-go-beijing
4. ^"Robotaxi." Wikipedia, accessed July 2026. en.wikipedia.org/...Robotaxi
5. ^"Baidu (BIDU) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript." The Motley Fool, August 22, 2024. fool.com/...-bidu-q2-2024-earnings-call-transcript
6. ^"Baidu (BIDU) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript." The Motley Fool, February 18, 2025. fool.com/...-bidu-q4-2024-earnings-call-transcript
7. ^"Baidu Announces First Quarter 2026 Results." Baidu, Inc. investor release (via StockTitan), May 2026. stocktitan.net/...-first-quarter-2026-s1pe0yett68v
8. ^"Super cheap robotaxi rides spark widespread anxiety in China." CNN, July 18, 2024. edition.cnn.com/...lo-go-robotaxi-anxiety-intl-hnk
9. ^"Apollo Go." Wikipedia, accessed July 2026. en.wikipedia.org/...Apollo_Go
10. ^Bradsher, Keith. "Lyft and Baidu in Deal to Use Chinese Driverless Cars in Europe." The New York Times, August 4, 2025. nytimes.com/...lyft-baidu-driverless-cars-europe
11. ^"Baidu strikes deal to bring its driverless cars to Uber globally." CNBC, July 15, 2025. cnbc.com/...g-its-driverless-cars-to-uber-globally
12. ^"Baidu Apollo (Apolong)." Wikipedia, accessed July 2026. en.wikipedia.org/...Baidu_Apollo