Baidu says it has won approval to start collecting fares for Apollo Go robotaxis in Beijing's Yizhuang district, the first such approval in a large Chinese city
- Beijing's municipal government has approved a permit for Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxi business to collect fares in a part of the capital city.
Context & Ripple Effects
Baidu's Apollo Go has been running robotaxi rides in Chinese cities as supervised pilots; what changes here is that Beijing's municipal government has issued the first permit letting it charge passengers, starting in Yizhuang. That converts a subsidized demo into a revenue line inside a megacity.
The permit is also a regulatory signal: the same approval pathway later carried Apollo Go to fully driverless commercial operation in Chongqing and Wuhan, and by late 2025 Baidu was reporting 250K weekly ride orders globally, on par with Waymo's US pace.
First-order effects
- Riders in Yizhuang can now pay for Apollo Go trips rather than ride free, giving Baidu its first fare revenue from a large-city robotaxi zone and real utilization data to bring back to Beijing's regulator.
- Beijing's municipal government sets the template other Chinese cities will be pressed to follow or explain, since this is the first fare-collection approval of its kind in a major city.
Second-order effects
- Rival robotaxi operators in China now have to chase equivalent permits to stay commercially credible, turning municipal approval cadence into the competitive metric alongside fleet size and safety record.
- A working paid-service model strengthens Baidu's case abroad: the company subsequently took Apollo Go to testing in Hong Kong and planned European entries in Switzerland and Turkey, exporting the permit-first playbook.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Chinese autonomous-mobility scale-up runs through government-issued operating permits rather than open market entry, making city-level regulators the gatekeepers that decide which operators reach paid, then driverless, service.
- Fare-charging pilots are the step that makes purpose-built robotaxis like the RT6 — later tested on London streets — economically rational to manufacture at volume instead of retrofitting consumer cars.
The trend: China's robotaxi industry is scaling through staged municipal permits — free pilots, then paid fares, then driverless commercial zones — with each approval tier unlocking the next round of investment and geographic expansion.