Chinese tech company Baidu said on Monday it can sell robot taxis that have no human staff on board.
Baidu
BEIJING — Chinese tech companies Baidu The company reported that ridership for its Apollo Go robot taxis has slowed compared to the previous quarter.
Figures released Thursday by Baidu showed that publicly operated robotaxi trips rose 26% year-on-year to an average of 287,500 trips per month in the first half of the year, according to calculations by CNBC.
That’s a significant decrease from the 184% year-over-year increase in the first half of 2023, which averaged 229,000 trips per month.
Some cars will still require a safety driver and are not fully autonomous.
Baidu is one of the leading operators of robot taxis for the public in China, and regulators in parts of Beijing and cities like Wuhan (where Apollo Go has the largest operations) have allowed the company to collect fares.
Baidu said Thursday that Apollo Go had completed a cumulative 7 million rides as of July 28, up from 6 million as of April 19. The first time the company topped 1 million rides was in July 2022, two years ago.
Baidu Chief Executive Robin Li said on an earnings call on Thursday that the company’s Apollo Go robotaxis are now operating fully autonomously throughout much of Wuhan, with no safety staff on board, according to a FactSet transcript.
“This has a significant impact on costs,” he said.
Interest in Wuhan’s robotaxis grew in early July, coinciding with a surge in people switching jobs to ride-hailing, raising concerns about the impact of automation on jobs.
Li said Apollo Go has only about 1% of Wuhan’s ride-hailing market, and “scaling up is a gradual process that could take years.”
He said the local fleet consists of about 400 robotaxis, but did not reiterate long-term goals.
Baidu previously said it was operating more than 500 robotaxis in Wuhan, with plans to increase that to 1,000 by the end of the year.
Just a small part of the ride-hailing service
The company operated about 336,000 Apollo Go trips in China as of July 28, according to CNBC calculations, about 23% higher than the monthly average for the third quarter of 2023.
The growth rate of robotaxi ridership is over 20%, outpacing that of ride-hailing, but at a much smaller scale.
Didi Chuxing said earlier this week that its total transaction value in China grew 8.7% year-on-year in the three months to June 30. But its average daily transactions hit a record high of 33 million.
“Despite achieving these milestones, our share of the overall ride-hailing market is very small,” Baidu’s Li said. “It will take us years to gain meaningful market share in China and elsewhere.”