On 20 August local time, Uber said its platform had gone live in Dubai with Baidu’s Apollo Go driverless vehicles, operated by UAE firm New Horizon Luxury Transport. Riders choosing UberX or Uber Comfort can now be matched to an Apollo Go, and an ‘autonomous’ option in the app raises the odds. Service starts in Umm Suqeim and parts of Jumeirah, with expansion planned.
Apollo Go had already launched its own Dubai app, Apollo Go, in March with the city’s largest driverless fleet, earning strong reviews and a surge in orders. The Uber link lets users hail from either platform. The numbers behind it: Apollo Go runs in 28 cities, has completed more than 23 million trips, driven over 350 million km autonomously, and more than 240 million km fully driverless.
Notably, Apollo Go holds Hong Kong’s first fully driverless test licence and started testing on the airport island, the first platform to run full driverless tests under a right-hand-drive, left-traffic system. For Baidu, Dubai is a showcase that its autonomous stack can plug into a Western mobility platform and a foreign regulatory regime at once.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Gasgoo report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.