Baidu's self-driving cars – the early days of China's autonomous-driving push
Chinese internet company Baidu is among the pioneers in developing self-driving cars.
Chinese internet company Baidu is among the pioneers in developing self-driving cars. With an open platform, founder Robin Li wants to make his software the basis for the next generation of computer-driven cars. In Beijing, the company introduced its prototype vehicles to a small group of journalists. Stephan Scheuer was there.
Background
Baidu is considered the "Chinese Google": the country's dominant search engine, plus maps, cloud services and its own AI platform. In 2017 Baidu introduced an open software platform for autonomous driving under the name Apollo – named after the Apollo moon programme, as a symbol of the ambition to be world-leading in a key future technology. This report captures those early days.
The strategy was open from the start: Baidu invited other companies to integrate their cars and sensors into the Apollo platform. The first partners included Chinese carmakers like FAW and BAIC, later also Nvidia and Bosch. In the background, Baidu pursued two parallel goals: on the one hand, to establish an operating system for self-driving cars (comparable to Android); on the other, to operate its own robotaxi fleets.
Today Baidu operates commercial robotaxi fleets in several Chinese cities under the name Apollo Go, including Beijing, Wuhan, Chongqing and Shenzhen. The services run in some areas already without a safety driver; in Wuhan, Apollo Go serves an area in which several hundred vehicles already operate driverless around the clock. In 2024 the brand reached more than 10 million cumulative rides – significantly more than all Western competitors combined.
Alongside Baidu, Chinese start-ups like Pony.ai, WeRide, AutoX and Alibaba-affiliated DeepRoute are pushing into the market. All of them hold commercial robotaxi licences in several cities – a density not reached in any other region of the world. In the US the market focuses on Waymo (Alphabet subsidiary) and Cruise (GM subsidiary, now significantly scaled back). Tesla unveiled its "Robotaxi" project Cybercab in 2024 but is still ahead of commercial launch.
Two factors make China the lead market for autonomous vehicles: first, the willingness of authorities to open entire city districts for testing, often even with adapted infrastructure (traffic lights that communicate with vehicles). Second, regulation that comes from central and local governments in a coordinated way – unlike in the US, where individual states set their own rules.
International expansion remains limited for now. Apollo Go runs first pilot projects in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In Europe and the US, regulatory hurdles and geopolitical concerns (data security being the keyword) have so far prevented a market entry by Chinese robotaxi providers.