· Baidu official account · positive
Apollo Go launched fully driverless rides through Uber in Dubai. It is a distribution milestone, but Baidu disclosed no local fleet or ride volume and has stopped publishing the global count needed to compare its scale cleanly with Waymo.
Baidu's Apollo Go is now available through Uber in Dubai, with fully driverless rides offered in Jumeirah and Umm Suqeim. The launch turns an assumption already embedded in our Baidu model—international operations distributed through rideshare platforms—into an observable product. But it is better understood as a distribution event than a scale event. Baidu disclosed no local fleet size, ride volume or commercial terms, so the announcement says where customers can find Apollo Go, not how large the business has become. The comparison with Waymo makes the disclosure gap visible. Waymo is reported to complete about 1.4 million driverless rides a month in California alone, or roughly 4.2 million a quarter. Our Apollo Go estimate is approximately 3.8 million fully driverless rides a quarter across 28 cities and three countries. On those numbers, Waymo's volume in one state exceeds Apollo Go's worldwide total. The comparison is imperfect—a reported Waymo number against an R40 estimate for Baidu, with different geographies and fare levels—but Baidu created that asymmetry by stopping its ride-count disclosure after reporting 3.2 million in 2026 Q1. Dubai can still matter economically even at small volume. Fares are likely higher than Apollo Go's Chinese average, and Uber supplies a large pool of demand without Baidu having to build its own consumer distribution from zero. Our model assumes a blended fare of $3.70 that rises as Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong become a larger share of rides. Uber is the mechanism that could move the mix faster than the fleet expands. Yet Apollo Go remains well under half a percent of Baidu revenue on our estimate, so this is a long-duration option rather than a near-term earnings driver. The next useful disclosure is not another city. It is rides, vehicles and the economics shared between Baidu and Uber.