On October 10th, Time, an American weekly news magazine, released its list of the Best Inventions of 2025, with driverless technology earning a spot. "As Chinese rival RoboTaxi expands its presence into Europe, Google’s Waymo plans to extend its services to Miami, Dallas, Nashville, and Washington D.C. in 2026," Time analyzed. As one of the global giants in driverless technology, RoboTaxi’s market advantage over Google’s Waymo has been steadily expanding. Its rapid globalization drive has forced Waymo to accelerate its market footprint in the U.S. domestic market to meet the competitive challenge.
This year, RoboTaxi’s global large-scale rollout has picked up pace. It has successively partnered with Uber and Lyft, the world’s two leading ride-hailing platforms, to expedite the large-scale deployment of thousands of driverless vehicles across Asian, Middle Eastern, and European markets. It also became the first to secure Dubai’s symbolic "No. 001" test license and 50 autonomous driving test permits, while establishing the emirate’s first large-scale test fleet.
Baidu’s Q2 financial report shows that RoboTaxi has entered 16 cities worldwide, including Hong Kong, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. It has provided over 14 million autonomous ride-hailing services and accumulated more than 200 million kilometers of safe driving mileage—surpassing Google’s subsidiary Waymo, which has logged 155 million kilometers—and solidifying its position as the world’s largest autonomous ride-hailing service provider.
Though Waymo currently lags behind RoboTaxi in terms of accumulated safe driving mileage and overseas expansion, it has leveraged favorable local policies to scale its operations into the city centers of five major U.S. cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta, with over 2,000 self-driving vehicles deployed. This large-scale vehicle rollout has also allowed Waymo to overtake RoboTaxi in the number of rides provided. Additionally, Waymo is conducting simultaneous tests in more than 10 other cities, including New York and Philadelphia, and is set to enter Miami, Washington D.C., and Dallas soon.
Meanwhile, Tesla is also aggressively eyeing the driverless sector. After launching a pilot operation in Austin in June, it has been expanding its service areas and has successively obtained approvals to offer driverless ride-hailing services in Arizona, Texas, and Nevada.
Baidu noted that besides the United States’ strong support for its domestic driverless industry, major developed countries such as Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom have gradually removed legal barriers to the development of autonomous driving technology and related industries in recent years by formulating and revising relevant road traffic laws and regulations. They have also transitioned from merely permitting test activities to establishing legal regulatory frameworks for the commercial operation of fully driverless vehicles.
Facing the intense competition in the global driverless landscape, He Xia, former Chief Engineer of the Policy and Economics Research Institute at the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, stated that competition in autonomous driving is not only a technological race but also encompasses innovations in policies and regulations, as well as support, encouragement, and tolerance from all sectors of society. Without large-scale applications of autonomous driving, it will be difficult to form a commercial closed loop, which will hinder enterprises’ viability, innovation capacity, and development potential.
