China's Baidu says weekly robotaxi rides hit 250,000 — same as Alphabet's Waymo this spring (www.cnbc.com)

Baidu’s Apollo Go said its fully driverless robotaxi service surpassed 250,000 paid rides per week as of Oct. 31, matching the weekly milestone Alphabet’s Waymo reported in the U.S. in April. Apollo Go reports 17 million ride orders to date, 240 million kilometers driven, and 140 million fully driverless rides, with an average of one airbag deployment per 10.1 million kilometers and no major accidents involving human injury or death. The service operates across Wuhan and parts of Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen and is expanding into Hong Kong, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Switzerland. It’s unclear how long the 250k/week rate has been sustained; Apollo averaged about 169k/week in the quarter ending June 30. For the AI/ML community, the numbers matter because they reflect real-world scale, labeled edge-case data and continuous feedback loops that accelerate perception, prediction and planning model improvements. High utilization across varied urban environments provides diverse sensor coverage and rare-event samples that are critical for training, validation and safety assurance. The comparison with Waymo underscores geopolitical competition in autonomous systems and commercialization: operational scale aids monetization and regulatory trust but also raises challenges in fleet management, long-tail safety validation and cross-jurisdictional deployment. Continued transparency on incident reporting and duration of the weekly rate will be important for assessing long-term performance and reproducibility of these results.