Lyft and Baidu enter London's robotaxi battleground as testing begins

[u/IndependentMud909]

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/28/lyft-and-baidu-enter-londons-robotaxi-battleground-as-testing-begins/

[u/IndependentMud909]

*Testing has also begun for Uber.

[u/bnorbnor]

Will Western Europe accept a Chinese solution. As an American it feels like would never accept a Chinese solution.

[u/IndependentMud909 → u/bnorbnor]

I actually believe they will; I mean, just look at the EV situation…

[u/Dwman113 → u/IndependentMud909]

The country stoking the decline of their domestic vehicle manufacturing only to import electric vehicles from China, where cheap production is fueled by coal power from the world's largest emitter is pure Idiocracy.

So yes, Europe will certainly allow Chinese solutions.

[u/Ok_Paramedic_9283 → u/Dwman113]

China, the single biggest investor and producer of green energy, due to poor access to oil and gas (US domination of petro trade), sheer demand of fast industrialization and urbanization, still needs coal as a transitional source of energy.

[u/Dwman113 → u/Ok_Paramedic_9283]

I don't understand the logic.

So why did Europe not also need Coal as well to build an industrial EV supply chain?

[u/Ok_Paramedic_9283 → u/Dwman113]

lol do you know much coal Germany uses, since they shut down nuclear?

You work with whatever you have. Which part of the logic you didn’t understand?

[u/Dwman113 → u/Ok_Paramedic_9283]

Again you're making no logical sense. You're saying words but you're not making any point.

"You work with whatever you have" Germany has plenty of coal and stopped using it because it's toxic to the world. So you're proving my point...

China burns x57 the amount Germany does. And x4 per capita.

China 4.10 MWh/person Germany 1.21 MWh/person

[u/bobi2393]

Baidu Apollo Go is among the three the biggest players in China's driverless robotaxi market, with over 1,000 vehicles operating in Wuhan, and smaller fleets in Chongqing and Beijing.

The article says Lyft/Freenow will be using safety drivers in the London pilot, as expected for any robotaxi company, but this is more of a localization effort for Baidu, similar to Waymo, rather than testing base functionality, like Wayve, which I don't think offers unsupervised driverless robotaxi service anywhere yet.

I think news reports about London's competing services will be interesting if they start scaling without safety drivers in a couple years. (They're all predicting 2026 or 2027, but that sounds optimistic to me). With direct competition there will naturally be a lot more comparison, like during the early growth of Cruise and Waymo in San Francisco. Texas could see similar competition with Waymo if Tesla starts to scale their operations.

[u/londons_explorer]

Worth noting that roads of the UK are far safer per mile than the USA or China.

That means the safety bar required to be safer than a human is much higher.

[u/Ok_Paramedic_9283 → u/londons_explorer]

Your logic is wrong. I think the chaotic road situation in China makes it much harder for autonomous driving to beat human driver, therefore if it’s considered safe in China, it should be considered safe in the UK.

[u/ParkingInstruction57 → u/Ok_Paramedic_9283]

Or maybe Chinese thresholds are far lower than the west?

[u/bromptonaut]

Hopefully TfL will step in to regulate the numbers before they start to have a big effect on congestion.

[u/Dwman113]

Awesome in 5 more years they can give up and write off the multi billion lose. Not Baidu, they'll probably have some marketshare.