China’s Baidu begins driverless car testing in UAE

• Apollo Go cars in Dubai and Abu Dhabi
• Vehicles are fully autonomous
• Baidu also testing in Hong Kong

Baidu, best known as China’s leading internet search engine, has begun open road testing of its Apollo Go autonomous vehicles in the UAE.

Apollo Go is the New York-listed company’s ride-hailing service – effectively China’s equivalent of Google’s Waymo.

The rollout comes weeks after Baidu said it would deploy thousands of Apollo Go vehicles on Uber’s platform in international markets, with initial launches planned for Asia and the Middle East.

“In Dubai and Abu Dhabi we started open road testing in designated areas in August,” Baidu chief executive Robin Li said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call this week.

Apollo Go delivered over 2.2 million fully driverless rides in the second quarter – a 148 percent increase from a year earlier. It now operates in 16 cities globally.

Baidu signed an agreement with Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority in March to deploy 100 RT6 robotaxis in the emirate by the end of this year, with plans to scale the fleet to 1,000 by 2028.

The autonomous vehicle service has accumulated more than 200 million kilometres of driverless travel to date, according to Baidu.

Further reading:

The company said its purpose-built RT6 has the lowest unit cost globally among Level 4 autonomous platforms, a category which allows fully driverless operation within defined areas.

Li said the company has made the most progress in right-hand drive robotaxi markets, citing active testing in Hong Kong as well as in the UAE.

“This is a space where hardly any companies of our kind have entered, and we’ve made by far the most progress,” he said.