Baidu Just Went Live in Dubai — and Quietly Became the World's Biggest Robotaxi Operator

While the American press has spent 2026 obsessing over Tesla's Cybercab rollout and Waymo's next city announcement, a different robotaxi story has been unfolding on a much bigger map. On Thursday, August 20, Uber and Baidu switched on a fully driverless robotaxi service in Dubai, putting Apollo Go's sixth-generation RT6 vehicles onto public roads in the Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah districts. It barely registered as news outside the region. It should have.

Add up the pieces Baidu has quietly assembled over the past twelve months — mainland China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Switzerland, and now the United Arab Emirates, with Germany and the UK queued up next through a partnership with Lyft — and Apollo Go is no longer a regional experiment. It is operating in 28 cities worldwide, has logged more than 350 million autonomous kilometres, and has quietly become the largest robotaxi operator on the planet by both fleet size and rides delivered. Waymo and Tesla are still fighting over American city maps. Baidu has been building an entire continent-hopping network.

The Dubai launch: what actually happened

The Dubai service runs through the Uber app, where riders in the two initial districts can now request a ride through UberX, Uber Comfort, or a dedicated "Autonomous" option that specifically summons an Apollo Go vehicle. The fleet is operated locally by New Horizon Luxury Transport, and the RT6 itself is a fully electric, purpose-built robotaxi carrying more than 30 sensors and seating up to three passengers, with real-time onboard data processing rather than a reliance on constant cloud connectivity.

Uber's Sarfraz Maredia described the moment as the point where "our multi-partner vision comes to life on public roads" — a reference to Uber's now-familiar strategy of working with multiple autonomous vehicle developers rather than betting on a single technology partner, the same approach it has taken with Waymo in the US and Wayve in London. Markets, notably, shrugged: Uber's stock barely moved on the news, a sign that investors have grown used to incremental AV milestones and are waiting for revenue proof rather than ride-along headlines.

If you have never sat in a car like this, our guide to how a robotaxi actually works from the passenger seat walks through the pickup, the ride and the handover in detail.

Twenty-eight cities and counting

The Dubai launch is the latest data point in an expansion curve that has been climbing steadily all year. Apollo Go closed out the fourth quarter of 2025 with more than 300,000 weekly trips and 3.4 million fully autonomous rides for the quarter alone — growth of over 200% year-on-year. By February 2026, the service had crossed 20 million cumulative global rides and 300 million autonomous kilometres driven, with a safety record the company puts at one airbag deployment per 12 million kilometres travelled.

Since then, the geographic spread has kept widening. South Korea's Seoul metropolitan area became Apollo Go's first market in Asia outside mainland China and Hong Kong, where regulators separately approved cross-district testing for what is Apollo Go's first right-hand-traffic market in Greater China. In the Gulf, Abu Dhabi struck a partnership with local operator AutoGo aimed at building what the companies describe as the region's largest driverless fleet, running in parallel with the Dubai-Uber service. By the time the Dubai cars hit the road this week, Baidu was citing 28 cities globally and more than 240 million kilometres logged in fully driverless mode, with no safety operator on board.

For comparison, the fastest American scale-up of the year — Tesla's 18-day sprint into Florida — is covered in Tesla Robotaxi Now Covers 7 Cities.

Beyond the Gulf: Switzerland's quieter bet

Not every Apollo Go deployment is chasing headline ride numbers. In eastern Switzerland's St. Gallen canton, Baidu has partnered with PostBus — the public-transport arm of Swiss Post — on a far more cautious rollout: mapping trips without passengers starting in December 2025, a supervised pilot with safety operators through the first half of 2026, and a target of regular public operations only in the first quarter of 2027. The vehicles seat up to four and are being positioned explicitly as a complement to, not a replacement for, Switzerland's existing public transport network.

"We will work closely with PostBus to enhance smart mobility in Switzerland, supplementing the existing public transport network and contributing to the nation's reputation for innovation," said Liang Zhang, Apollo Go's managing director for EMEA. The pacing says as much about Baidu's strategy as the Dubai launch does: where regulators move fast and infrastructure is Gulf-scale ambitious, Apollo Go moves fast. Where a market like Switzerland demands a slower, trust-first approach, the timeline stretches to match it — a contrast to the compressed rollout described in London Is About to Get Its First Robotaxi.

That London plan — a partnership with both Uber and Lyft to bring RT6 vehicles to UK streets — sits alongside a parallel push into Germany, part of a broader Lyft-Baidu agreement to deploy Apollo Go vehicles across Europe at a scale the companies say will eventually reach thousands of vehicles.

Why this matters more than it looks

It is tempting to read Apollo Go's expansion as a China-specific story with limited relevance to Western readers. That would be a mistake, for three reasons.

First, scale changes the safety conversation. A fleet with 350 million-plus autonomous kilometres behind it has encountered a far broader range of edge cases — extreme heat in Dubai, dense mixed traffic in Seoul, alpine roads in Switzerland — than any single-market operator. That accumulated experience becomes a competitive asset in exactly the software-learning sense that vision-based systems are also chasing, a debate we unpack in Lidar vs. Camera-Only: The 2026 Sensor Shootout.

Second, the partnership model is exportable. Every major Apollo Go deployment outside China rides on the back of an existing ride-hailing platform — Uber in Dubai, Uber and Lyft in London, Lyft across Germany and the UK. Baidu supplies the vehicle and the driving system; the ride-hailing incumbent supplies the demand, the regulatory relationships, and the app riders already have installed. That is a faster path to market than building a consumer app and a fleet from zero.

Third, the safety story is not uniformly clean. Reporting from China earlier this year flagged concerns about vehicle immobilisations during emergencies — instances where a driverless Apollo Go vehicle reportedly failed to move out of the way for emergency responders — prompting the company to say it is developing enhanced safety protocols and working toward international regulatory standards to support further expansion. It is a familiar pattern: Waymo pulled 3,871 vehicles for a software fix this summer, as we reported in Waymo Recalls 3,871 Robotaxis After Cars Drove Into Active Construction Zones. Baidu has set a target of 10 additional cities by the end of 2026; whether it can hit that number while also addressing the emergency-response criticism will be a real test of whether "move fast across borders" and "move safely" can coexist at this scale.

The regulatory patchwork behind the map

None of this expansion happens in a regulatory vacuum, and the terms differ sharply by market. Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority has taken an openly permissive stance toward driverless pilots, mirroring the UAE's broader strategy of using light-touch AV regulation to attract investment and technology partnerships. Switzerland's approach is the opposite: a phased, safety-driver-first pilot with a multi-year runway before regular commercial service is even attempted. China itself has been simultaneously encouraging Apollo Go's domestic scale-up while tightening safety oversight in response to the emergency-vehicle incidents.

That patchwork mirrors what US and European readers have already seen play out with the EU's incoming Autonomous Vehicle Act and NHTSA's move to drop manual-control requirements, which we covered in The Steering Wheel Is Next and Zoox Gets the Green Light. Every jurisdiction is independently deciding how fast to let driverless fleets scale, and Apollo Go's map is now a live test of which regulatory postures actually produce durable, safe operations rather than just fast headlines. If you want the European picture in one place, start with Self-Driving Cars in Europe: What's Legal and What's Not in 2026.

What to watch

The Lyft-powered Germany and UK launches. If Apollo Go vehicles hit London or German streets on the timelines Lyft and Baidu have described, it will mark Baidu's first foothold in Western Europe and set up a direct comparison with Waymo and Wayve on European soil.

Whether the 10-new-cities target survives scrutiny. Baidu's stated goal is ambitious even by its own recent pace — and it will be the clearest signal of whether the emergency-response safety concerns are slowing the company down or simply running in parallel with continued expansion.

Investor patience. Uber's muted stock reaction to a genuinely significant Dubai launch suggests the market has moved past being impressed by geographic firsts. The next re-rating moment will likely require actual unit economics — cost per ride, utilisation, and margin — rather than another city added to the map.

Apollo Go's rise is a reminder that the robotaxi race was never only an American story. While US operators fight over Austin, Phoenix, and San Francisco — a duel we break down in Tesla Robotaxi vs. Waymo — Baidu has been playing a different game entirely: one measured in continents, not city blocks.