If autonomous cars are supposed to make life easy, then Apollo Go, the robotaxi unit of Baidu, a Chinese tech giant, still has work to do. When your correspondent tested its service in the city of Wuhan he had to find his way to a designated pick-up location and end his journey at an approved drop-off spot—more like taking a bus than a cab.
Yet Apollo Go, which launched in Wuhan in 2022 and has since expanded to ten other Chinese cities, has been a hit. Its service has carried out 6m rides nationwide since launching. It now has more than 400 driverless cars on the road in Wuhan and plans to have 1,000 running by the end of this year. Chinese carmakers including Hongqi and Arcfox make the vehicles for Baidu, which provides the technology. Most of its cars in Wuhan have “level four” autonomy, which means they do not require human intervention in most situations on the road but can get muddled in areas such as parking garages—which might explain why it asks customers to trudge through the city’s sweltering heat.
