Apollo Go (Luobo Kuaipao)

Apollo Go is Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing service: a passenger hails a car through an app and is carried by a vehicle that drives itself. ^[1] Baidu reports the service's progress through ride figures published in its quarterly results, which makes Apollo Go one of the few robotaxi businesses whose operating scale can be followed from public documents. ^[1][2]

Scale of service

In the second quarter of 2025, Apollo Go provided more than 2.2 million fully driverless rides, a 148 percent increase over the same quarter a year earlier. ^[1] By August 2025 the cumulative number of rides provided to the public had passed 14 million. ^[1] The same quarterly release repeats these ride figures in Baidu's filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange, so the numbers appear both in the results announcement and in the regulatory document. ^[2]

The phrase "fully driverless" carries weight here. It separates rides in which the car drives with nobody in the driver's seat from earlier trials in which an engineer or safety operator sat in the vehicle. A programme can log a long testing distance without ever carrying a passenger in that mode, so counting completed driverless rides measures something different from counting test kilometres.

Footprint

As of June 2025, Apollo Go's global footprint covered 16 cities. ^[1] Growth has come from two directions: enlarging the areas in which testing is permitted, and entering new markets. In Hong Kong the company expanded its open-road testing area to residential areas in Tung Chung in June 2025 ^[1], and extended testing to the Southern District in August 2025. ^[1] In the same month it began open-road testing in designated areas in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi. ^[1]

Open-road testing in a designated area is an early step rather than an end state: the vehicle runs on public streets, but inside boundaries agreed with local authorities, and the arrangement is not the same thing as a commercial service open to any rider who opens the app.

Platform partnerships

Two agreements in the middle of 2025 changed how the service is meant to reach passengers. In July 2025 Apollo Go entered a multi-year strategic partnership with Uber to deploy thousands of its vehicles on the Uber platform, starting in Asia and the Middle East. ^[1] In August 2025 it agreed a strategic partnership with Lyft to deploy its vehicles across European markets, starting with Germany and the United Kingdom. ^[1]

The arrangement follows a division of labour familiar from ordinary ride-hailing. The operator supplies the vehicles and the self-driving system; the platform supplies the app, the riders, and the local payment and support machinery. For Apollo Go this is a route into markets where it does not have to build a consumer brand from nothing, and for the platforms it is a way to add driverless capacity without developing the technology themselves.

Where it sits

Taken together, the published figures and the partnership announcements describe a service that has moved past pure testing in terms of ride volume while still treating most of the world as testing territory. The ride counts give a rare public reading on how quickly a robotaxi operation can accumulate passenger-carrying trips, and the Uber and Lyft deals show a preference for reaching riders through existing platforms rather than only through Baidu's own app. What the numbers do not show is how the economics of each city work, or how the regulatory boundaries in Hong Kong, the Gulf and Europe will shift as testing gives way to commercial service.