Dubai's Robotaxis Are Already on the Road. Here's What's Actually Running.

For years, "self-driving taxis in Dubai" was a headline about a plan — a memorandum of understanding here, a pilot announcement there, a target date that always sat a comfortable distance in the future. That changed on March 30, 2026, when Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) confirmed it had moved its autonomous taxi service from trial to commercial operation in the Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah areas, according to the UAE's state news agency WAM and the Dubai Media Office.

This isn't a single company's science project. It's two separate autonomous-vehicle operators running side by side, under one regulator, as part of a transport strategy the emirate has been building toward since 2023.

How the Rollout Actually Got Here

The commercial launch didn't appear out of nowhere — it was the final step in a staged rollout the RTA had been telegraphing for roughly a year.

In April 2025, the RTA signed an agreement with Chinese autonomous-driving firm Baidu to bring its Apollo Go robotaxi unit to Dubai, starting with a small fleet of around 50 vehicles and a multi-year plan to scale toward roughly 1,000. Around the same time, the RTA struck a separate deal with Uber and California-based WeRide, under which WeRide's vehicles would be bookable through the regular Uber app rather than a standalone robotaxi app.

By December 2025, according to Gulf News, that groundwork turned into a public pilot: Uber riders in Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah could hail a WeRide vehicle, though a trained safety operator still sat behind the wheel. Baidu ran a parallel track, putting its RT6 vehicles through open-road testing in Jumeirah, Dubai Festival City and Zabeel, and reporting — by its own account — hundreds of completed trial rides with no safety incidents.

Those two tracks converged on March 30, 2026, when the RTA announced the service had moved into full commercial operation, with a first-phase fleet of around 100 autonomous taxis across both operators, and plans to expand the fleet gradually in the years ahead.

Two Companies, Two Apps, One Regulator

What makes Dubai's approach distinctive isn't just the launch date — it's the structure underneath it. Rather than picking one winner, the RTA is running Baidu's Apollo Go and WeRide as parallel, competing services inside the same regulatory sandbox, each with a different front door for riders:

WeRide vehicles are booked through the Uber app, the same interface Dubai residents already use for ordinary taxis and ride-hailing. Local firm Tawasul Transport handles fleet management and day-to-day operations on WeRide's behalf.
Apollo Go, Baidu's robotaxi arm, runs through its own standalone app, operating in partnership with Dubai Taxi Company — the same state-linked operator behind the emirate's conventional taxi fleet.

That dual-app, dual-operator model lets the RTA compare two different autonomous-driving stacks on the same streets in real time, rather than betting the whole program on a single vendor's technology. It also means Dubai residents may end up choosing between two different self-driving taxi experiences the way they'd choose between two ride-hailing apps today.

The 2030 Target Behind the Launch

The commercial launch isn't a standalone initiative — it's a visible milestone inside the RTA's Self-Driving Transport Strategy, first announced in 2023, which sets a target of shifting 25% of all journeys in Dubai to autonomous modes by 2030. That figure covers more than robotaxis; it includes autonomous buses, delivery vehicles and other driverless transport modes the RTA has trialed over the past several years.

Framed against that target, 100 vehicles in two neighborhoods is a deliberately small opening move. The real test isn't whether a robotaxi can navigate Jumeirah's beach-road traffic — Baidu and WeRide have already logged extended open-road testing there — it's whether the RTA can scale fleet size, geographic coverage and operator variety fast enough to make a meaningful dent in Dubai's overall trip count within four years.

Why Dubai, Specifically

Dubai's pitch to autonomous-vehicle operators has always rested on a few structural advantages that are harder to replicate in most Western markets: a single transport regulator with broad authority to approve and license a new mode quickly, newer road infrastructure with less legacy complexity, and a government willing to let foreign operators — a Chinese firm and a US ride-hailing giant — run commercial services in parallel rather than favoring a domestic champion.

That regulatory posture is also why Dubai keeps showing up early in global rollout plans for companies like Baidu, whose Apollo Go has otherwise concentrated its commercial operations inside China, and WeRide, which has been expanding into Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Singapore alongside its Dubai launch. For these companies, a commercial green light in Dubai functions as both a real market and a reference case for regulators elsewhere still working out how to license driverless taxis at all.

What to Watch Next

The open question now is less about whether the technology works — both operators have months of open-road testing behind them — and more about pace and transparency. Does the 100-vehicle fleet expand on the RTA's stated multi-year timeline, or accelerate once early ridership data comes in? Do WeRide and Apollo Go publish incident data as the service scales beyond two neighborhoods, the way Baidu has already volunteered trial-phase safety figures? And does Dubai's two-operator model hold, or does one service pull ahead on reliability and rider adoption the way ride-hailing apps eventually consolidated around a handful of winners in other markets?

For now, what's verifiable is the baseline fact itself: Dubai isn't running a limited-scope experiment anymore. As of this spring, it has a licensed, commercial, multi-operator autonomous taxi service on public roads — a status very few cities in the world can currently claim.

Sources: WAM (UAE state news agency), RTA/Dubai Media Office official statements, Gulf News, Gulf Business, and Khaleej Times reporting on Dubai's Self-Driving Transport Strategy. EOF echo wrote