China has a clear lead on electric vehicle technology, batteries and production and sales numbers. However, it’s not as far ahead when it comes to driverless taxis. Just like in the United States, there are three major robotaxi players that are slowly expanding their reach and fleets, with one company far ahead of the others.
In China, that’s Baidu’s Apollo Go (launched in 2019), whose operation is comparable in scale and breadth to the U.S. robotaxi leader, Waymo. But while their operations might be similarly sized, they cover a lot more cities in China. One Reuters report from December 2024 said that “at least 19 Chinese cities are running robotaxi and robobus tests,” although not all of them have large-scale deployment and it doesn’t specify which company operates where.
The Heavyweights
Apollo Go operates a fleet of over 1,000 vehicles and is present in 16 cities, including China’s largest urban centers, as well as abroad in places like Abu Dhabi and Dubai. It recently signed a partnership with Uber to offer its driverless ride-hailing services in Asia and the Middle East. It also teamed up with Uber rival Lyft to expand into Europe, with plans to launch the service in the United Kingdom and Germany in 2026, where it will roll out its next-generation autonomous vehicles.
In August 2025, Apollo Go reported that it had completed 2.2 million driverless rides in Q2, which was up 148% year-over-year and it works out to around 170,000 rides per week. This brought the annual total through Q2 to over 14 million rides, with its fleet racking up over 120 million driverless miles.
In the United States, you can hail a driverless cab in parts of five cities and sections of their metro areas. The biggest player, Waymo, currently offers rides in Phoenix (where the service was launched in 2020), Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta and Austin, with confirmed plans to expand into Washington DC and Miami next. Reuters noted in August of this year that Waymo covered around 3% of the U.S. population.
Waymo said in May that its fleet has exceeded 1,500 vehicles and averages around 250,000 trips per week. It plans to add 2,000 more Jaguar I-Pace-based autonomous vehicles through 2026 and, just like Apollo Go, it also wants to expand outside the United States with plans to launch its robotaxi service in London next year.
Up-And-Comers
Pony.ai is China’s second-largest robotaxi company and is present in four Chinese cities. At the start of 2025, it had a fleet of around 250 vehicles, but one Nasdaq report says it wants to hit 1,000 vehicles by the end of 2025, and then increase that to 10,000 in the next three to five years, according to another report from China Daily Hong Kong.
Third place in China’s robotaxi race is WeRide, whose website says it has “deployed autonomous driving vehicles for operation and testing in over 30 cities worldwide across ten countries.” It brands itself a “global leader in autonomous driving and robotaxi” and says it has currently rolled out over 700 robotaxis and more than 1,500 autonomous vehicles in 11 countries, although it says it holds autonomous vehicle licenses in only seven countries (including the U.S. and France).
Another big name in China is AutoX, a company founded in 2016 with backing from Alibaba. It launched the country’s first robotaxi service without a safety driver on board back in 2021 and claims its robotaxi fleet surpassed the 1,000 mark in early 2022. Even though the company only operates in major Chinese cities, it actually conducted trials in California in 2020 before going commercial in China. However, for a company with such a large fleet, concrete information about its operation is pretty sparse.
America’s second-biggest robotaxi player, General Motors-owned Cruise, halted operations in October of 2023. This was prompted after a series of incidents led the DMV to call its autonomous vehicles “not safe for the public’s operation.” The company didn’t say it was out of the robotaxi game, this being merely a “pause”, so it could presumably come back at some point in the future.
With Cruise out of the game for now, Tesla is the next-biggest robotaxi operator in the United States, although its operation is far smaller than Waymo’s, at least for now. After launching its robotaxi business in June, it now only operates a few dozen vehicles in and around select areas of Austin and San Francisco.
Amazon-backed Zoox is another player with big ambitions in the AV taxi space, which recently launched its services in Las Vegas. All rides are free for now, since this is more of a pilot program than anything else, but what makes it special is that you won’t be picked up in a regular car that looks like it crashed into a warehouse full of sensors.
What Robotaxis Actually Are
Most robotaxi companies operate modified electric vehicles laden with sensors and cameras. All these companies plan to launch dedicated driverless taxis at some point, and some have already revealed the design, but regular cars with massive sensor arrays will have to do for now.
Apollo Go initially used a series of vehicles retrofitted for the purpose, but it is now switching to the purpose-built Apollo RT6. Parent company Baidu says it is the company’s sixth-generation AV taxi, but it looks pretty conventional, like a cross between a crossover and a minivan. The self-driving sensor integration is much less visible and bulky than in older vehicles, though, but it’s not what you’d call futuristic.
Its previous fifth-generation vehicle was the Apollo Moon, which was co-developed with BAIC’s Arcfox brand, and even though it was launched four years ago, many Moons are still in operation today.
China’s Pony.ai revealed its lineup of seventh-generation robotaxis in late August. They are all Toyota-based and look like typical cars with a massive roof box full of sensors and cameras. The most common vehicle currently in its fleet is based on the Toyota Sienna minivan and was introduced in 2022.
WeRide revealed its first proper ground-up vehicle, which adopts a van form factor with no B-pillar, making access very easy. It’s called the GXR, and it looks a lot more spacious than most other robotaxis from around the world, and the company promises it has a “comprehensive redundancy system” that should give passengers peace of mind when traveling aboard. It still has a place for the driver and a steering wheel, but WeRide also has a driverless minibus already in operation that doesn’t have a place for the driver.
Waymo is famous for its unusual choice of base for its autonomous taxis: the Jaguar I-Pace, a crossover with quirky styling that doesn’t seem like a natural choice for a taxi cab. It also features custom-built Chrysler Pacifica minivans and the company wants to switch to vehicles built by Geely’s luxury arm Zeekr in the future.
Tesla’s autonomous ride-hailing cars are Model Y for now. They are basically just normal cars running Full Self-Driving and have a safety driver onboard. The fleet is small right now, so wait times are pretty long. It’s more of a pilot program than an actual ride-hailing service that you can rely on, but Tesla has big plans for the service and intends to switch to its purpose-built Cybercab. Production of that vehicle begins in Q2 2026, if all goes to plan, of course.
It’s worth noting that the Tesla Cybercab is the only vehicle in the world that relies solely on cameras to understand its surroundings. Just like today’s Teslas, it has no radar, no lidar and no ultrasonic sensors to make sense of what’s around it. This is in stark contrast to the sensor-laden robotaxis that every other company is rolling out.
The coolest-looking and most futuristic robotaxi operated by any company around the world today is from Zoox. As the company itself points out, “it’s not a car,” and it looks like something straight out of a sci-fi movie set a couple of decades in the future. It’s essentially a pod on wheels with no helm or place for the driver and with sensors at each corner. Automatic sliding doors make getting in as easy as possible.
The Robotaxi Race Has Only Just Started
Waymo is bigger in terms of its fleet and number of rides than China’s Apollo Go, but added up, China’s major robotaxi players have a bigger overall presence than the companies from the United States, and give more combined rides. The race to become the world’s biggest robotaxi company is tight right now and companies from both countries are increasingly looking to expand their presence abroad.
So far, they have not faced off directly on the same market, but they probably will in the near future as they all want to eventually set up shop in Europe, which doesn’t have any of its own companies to rival what’s coming from America or China. This is only the start of the robotaxi race, which, according to Goldman Sachs, will see “a few million” autonomous vehicles hit the road globally by 2030, potentially comprising as much as 10% of all new passenger vehicle sales.
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