Dubai has put its first driverless taxis into official operation, moving the project from trials to live traffic mode as the city prepares a public launch in the first quarter of 2026.

The program is run by the Roads and Transport Authority with China’s Baidu Apollo Go, the robotaxi arm of Baidu. The fleet uses the RT6, the company’s sixth-generation autonomous vehicle, built for large-scale commercial service rather than limited pilots.

Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum marked the start with a ride to the World Governments Summit at Madinat Jumeirah, a public show of support for the emirate’s autonomous transport push.

According to the RTA, the cars are already operating on roads open to regular traffic. The system “ensures safe and seamless mobility within a real urban environment and on roads open to live traffic,” the authority explained.

Each vehicle carries more than 40 sensors, including LiDAR, radar and camera arrays, feeding an AI stack that handles perception and driving decisions in real time. The software is tied to high-definition maps and deep-learning models designed to cope with intersections, pedestrians and dense city traffic while staying compliant within local highway laws.

Apollo Go has plenty of experience in this sector: Its vehicles have logged more than 150 million kilometers of safe driving and completed over 10 million autonomous trips across several cities, which Dubai hopes to tap into as it shifts from testing to day-to-day service.

The partnership has moved quickly. Discussions at last year’s summit led to an MoU, then road trials, then formal operations in roughly ten months — which is unusually fast for regulated transport.

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Apollo Go has also opened its first operations and control center outside China at Dubai Science Park. The 2,000-square-metre site houses fleet monitoring, simulation and training rooms, plus maintenance and inspection bays. It manages daily performance, software updates and safety checks.

The company plans to grow the Dubai fleet to more than 1,000 vehicles over the next few years.

For the RTA, the bet is straightforward: make autonomous taxis a normal part of public transport, not a demo. If the 2026 launch goes according to plan, Dubai would rank among the first cities outside China running robotaxis at a meaningful commercial scale, and a regional test ground for driverless mobility.