Future World Forum Dubai's robotaxis go commercial
Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority started commercial autonomous taxi operations on 30 March 2026, covering Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah with an initial fleet of 100 vehicles. Rides are booked through the Uber app or the Apollo Go app, with the RTA describing a gradual widening of the fleet over the years that follow.
The vehicles come from WeRide and from Apollo Go, Baidu's autonomous driving arm, with Tawasul Transport handling fleet operations and Dubai Taxi Company supporting locally. Between them the two operators had logged more than 150 million kilometres of driving and over 10 million autonomous trips elsewhere before the Dubai launch.
Trials ran in the same districts through 2025 before the switch to paying passengers.
The detail worth noticing is not the technology but the sequencing: a bounded geography, an existing hailing app as the front door, and a public operator keeping the fleet contract. That is a template a transport authority elsewhere can copy without owning the software, and it is the sort of thing a mobility panel is for — the vehicles are the least transferable part of the story.
Source: Dubai Media Office checked against the source
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