Baidu Plans To Launch Driverless Taxi Service In Europe

Posted by By Dan Taylor 2 Min Read

Chinese tech giant Baidu is preparing to bring its driverless ride-hailing service, Apollo Go, to Europe for the first time, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

The company is planning to set up a local entity in Switzerland and aims to begin testing its robotaxi technology by the end of 2025. The information comes from sources familiar with Baidu’s plans, as reported by the WSJ.

Apollo Go currently operates across several cities in China. Its largest deployment is in Wuhan, where Baidu runs a fleet of over 400 autonomous vehicles.

Talks With Swiss Transit Company Underway

The report also mentioned that Baidu has been in talks with Swiss bus operator PostAuto to introduce Apollo Go in Switzerland. However, Swiss Post, PostAuto’s parent company, clarified to Reuters that no formal partnership currently exists with Baidu or any other tech provider.

In a statement, Swiss Post said its Mobility Services unit is exploring future transportation solutions and evolving customer needs, but confirmed no agreement is in place.

Expansion Beyond Switzerland

Baidu’s expansion plans are not limited to Switzerland. The WSJ report also stated that the company is planning to introduce Apollo Go in Turkey, though no timeline or further details have been provided.

Apollo Go is one of the most active robotaxi programs in the world. Its operations in China include several cities and represent a major push by Baidu into autonomous mobility.

Baidu has not responded to requests for comment as of this publication.

Dan Taylor
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Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor