Baidu’s robotaxis hit Uber in Dubai, no safety driver

Uber has quietly begun matching riders in Dubai with driverless taxis built by Baidu, marking the first time the Chinese tech giant’s Apollo Go vehicles have been integrated into a major ride-hailing platform outside China. Book a standard UberX or Uber Comfort in certain coastal districts now, and the app may assign you an empty car with no safety driver present. A separate “Autonomous” option in the app increases the chances of being paired with one of these vehicles for those who specifically want the experience.

The service launched on Thursday, though it is limited to select areas within Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah rather than covering the entire city. A local operator, New Horizon Luxury Transport, owns and manages the fleet. Neither Uber nor Baidu has disclosed how many vehicles are currently in operation, what the fares are, or whether driverless trips are priced differently from those with a human driver.

There is a notable detail buried in the mechanics of the rollout. Riders booking a conventional UberX or Uber Comfort within the launch zone can be matched with a driverless vehicle without having requested one. Opting for the “Autonomous” category makes that outcome more likely, but it is not the only pathway into the back seat of a car with no one at the wheel.

The timing here is the most telling element. Just one day earlier, on Wednesday, Uber activated its first autonomous ride-hailing service in Europe, launching in Zagreb with Pony.ai and the Croatian operator Verne. Those vehicles went live with a safety driver seated in the front, as Uber confirmed in its own announcement at the time.

A mere 24 hours later, the same company switched on Apollo Go in Dubai with completely empty front seats. Same platform, same week, yet two starkly different regulatory approaches to the identical question of how much human oversight is required. Uber made no mention of the contrast between the two launches, and neither press release references the other.

The Zagreb operation covers significant portions of the Croatian capital, including the city centre, with Uber indicating that coverage will expand over time. Dubai begins smaller in geography but emptier in the cabin. Which of those two constraints carries more weight depends entirely on whether you are a regulator or a shareholder.

The vehicles themselves are Apollo Go’s sixth-generation RT6, a purpose-built electric car designed from the ground up for driverless operation. Each unit seats up to three passengers. Baidu states that the RT6 is equipped with more than 30 sensors and processes all visual data onboard in real time.

Baidu provided the scale figures, and no independent party has audited them. The company claims Apollo Go has operated across 28 cities, with its fleets logging more than 350 million autonomous kilometres, over 240 million of those fully driverless. Baidu describes the safety record as outstanding without releasing the underlying incident data to back that characterization.

Uber maintains that every autonomous vehicle on its network, Apollo Go included, must satisfy its own safety guidelines before carrying passengers. The company has not published those guidelines in their entirety.

The launch announcement claims a first for a multi-partner autonomous network globally, but the two executives quoted within it make more modest assertions, and they do not align with one another.

Sarfraz Maredia, Uber’s global head of autonomous vehicles, said Dubai “marks the first time our multi-partner vision comes to life on public roads.” That framing concerns Uber’s internal strategy rather than any industry milestone.

Nan Yang, a Baidu vice president overseeing the overseas division of its intelligent driving group, offered a different claim. Dubai is “the first city where we’ve successfully established a dual-model offering both self-operated and partner-based autonomous ride-hailing services internationally,” he said. That distinction is about Baidu running its own vehicles alongside someone else’s operation in a single market.

The ownership structure deserves closer attention. Uber provides the demand and the application interface. Baidu supplies the cars and the autonomous driving technology. New Horizon Luxury Transport owns and operates the fleet on the ground. None of the three companies handles the entire chain alone.

This arrangement reflects the direction Uber has pursued since abandoning its role as an exclusive front end for any single autonomous partner. In July, the company agreed to end its exclusivity arrangement with Waymo in Austin and Atlanta, and it now reports working with more than 30 autonomous vehicle partners. Uber calls the result a hybrid network, where self-driving cars and human drivers take fares side by side.

The press release describes Dubai as the launchpad for scaling thousands of Apollo Go vehicles across Uber’s global network. That is an aspiration for the partnership, not a description of the current fleet. Uber says it completes millions of autonomous trips annually across all its partners, set against more than 79 billion total trips since 2010. Autonomy remains a statistical rounding error in its own numbers.

Baidu is not the only Chinese firm finding international routes through partnerships. Pony.ai and Uber announced this month that they would place 2,000 Chinese robotaxis on European streets, and Pony.ai’s technology powers the Zagreb launch. Apollo Go itself secured Level 4 approval in Switzerland back in June.

The Gulf region has proven the fastest pathway for these expansions. Dubai has moved more quickly than European regulators on driverless permissions, and a launch with no operator in the vehicle is the clearest demonstration of that speed to date.

Two indicators will determine whether this is a demonstration project or a genuine business. The first is the operating territory. Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah represent a narrow slice of Dubai, and Uber says it plans to expand without offering a timeline.

The second is transparency. Robotaxi fleets are scaling faster than the industry’s willingness to publish data about them, and neither Uber nor Baidu has released a vehicle count, a ride target, or an incident rate for Dubai. Until one of them does, the most significant number attached to this launch remains the one nobody has provided.