The robotaxi race just got a lot more interesting. Baidu's Apollo Go announced it's now handling 250,000 fully driverless rides per week as of October 31 — matching the exact figure Waymo reported back in April. It's a milestone that puts China's biggest search company neck-and-neck with Google's autonomous driving unit in the global race to prove robotaxis can actually work at scale.
Baidu's Apollo Go just fired a shot across the bow in the global robotaxi wars. The Chinese tech giant announced Monday that its fully autonomous vehicles are now completing 250,000 rides per week — precisely matching what Waymo reported during its spring surge.
The timing couldn't be more pointed. As Chinese and U.S. companies duke it out for autonomous driving supremacy, Baidu is making it clear it won't cede ground to Google's Waymo, which operates primarily in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. The numbers represent a dramatic acceleration for Apollo Go, which was averaging about 169,000 rides weekly in Q2 based on CNBC's calculations of the company's disclosed 2.2 million quarterly rides.
That's a 48% jump in just months — the kind of hockey stick growth that makes investors take notice and regulators nervous. Baidu didn't specify exactly when it hit the 250,000 threshold, but the company's spokesperson confirmed the milestone as of October 31.
The competitive dynamics are fascinating here. While Waymo has been methodically expanding across U.S. markets — recently partnering with Uber in Austin and Atlanta — Apollo Go is playing a different game entirely. The Chinese company operates across multiple major cities including Wuhan, Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, and it's simultaneously pushing into international markets like Hong Kong, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and most recently Switzerland.
It's a classic tech platform strategy: go wide, go fast, and establish market presence before competitors can catch up. Apollo Go claims it has racked up 17 million total ride orders and logged 240 million kilometers of driving data, with 140 million of those rides being fully driverless.
The safety numbers tell an interesting story too. Apollo Go reports one airbag deployment incident for every 10.1 million kilometers driven, with no major accidents involving human injury or death. That's the kind of safety record regulators want to see before green-lighting commercial expansion.
