Robotaxis at Scale

For years, China’s robotaxi ambitions were a story of pilots and promises. In 2025 they became a story of throughput. Baidu’s Apollo Go, the largest of the Chinese fleets, crossed 11 million cumulative public rides by May and more than 17 million by November, a six-month jump that reflects how quickly the service is compounding.^[1][2] By that point it was running over 250,000 fully driverless orders a week, with no safety operator in the car, across 22 cities from Wuhan and Shenzhen to Dubai and Abu Dhabi.^[2]

The comparison that caught the industry’s attention: those 250,000 weekly rides matched the figure Alphabet’s Waymo had reached in spring 2025, with the distinction that every Apollo Go ride in mainland China is fully driverless.^[3] It is a genuine milestone, and also a snapshot: by early 2026 Waymo had roughly doubled again, to about 500,000 weekly rides, so “parity” was a moment, not a lasting lead.^[3]

A three-horse domestic field

Behind Baidu, two well-funded challengers reached comparable scale. Pony.ai operated 961 robotaxis as of late November 2025, with fully driverless commercial service in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Beijing and a target of more than 3,000 vehicles by the end of 2026.^[4] WeRide’s global fleet passed 1,000 vehicles in January 2026, spanning ten-plus cities.^[5] The regulatory door has opened to match: as of July 2025, all four of China’s first-tier cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, permit paid, fully driverless service, with Shanghai the last to approve.^[6]

The question about Chinese robotaxis has quietly shifted from “does it work?” to “how many, how fast, and at what cost?”

One honest note on the numbers: cumulative ride counts and weekly figures are company-reported and unaudited, and headline fleet totals sometimes blend fully-driverless domestic operations with safety-supervised vehicles overseas. The scale is real; the precise league table shifts monthly.

Scale changes the nature of the risk. A pilot fleet can be babysat; a fleet running a quarter-million driverless trips a week across two dozen cities cannot, so the operational questions, remote assistance, incident response, fleet uptime, city-by-city permitting, become the business, and they are unglamorous, capital-hungry and hard to fake. This is also why the domestic three-way race matters more than the Waymo comparison: with Baidu, Pony.ai and WeRide each past a thousand vehicles, China has not one bet on autonomy but three, competing on cost and coverage in the same permissive market. Redundancy of that kind is itself a structural advantage.

Reading it as an investor

Robotaxis have crossed the line from technical demonstration to operating business, and China now hosts one of the world’s two centres of gravity in the field. The investable questions from here are no longer about whether the vehicles can drive themselves, three fleets prove they can, but about cost per mile, city-by-city regulatory access, and which operators convert scale into durable economics before the capital runs ahead of the revenue. Deployment is solved; the business model is the frontier, and it is the subject of our next brief.