Robotaxi Race Shifts to Cities: Shenzhen and Los Angeles Take Center Stage

In San Francisco this summer, Waymo’s daily ride orders at one point exceeded those of Lyft, the report said. On the other side of the Pacific, Apollo Go completed 3.2 million rides in the first quarter of 2026, up more than 120% year on year. The two companies have each surpassed 20 million cumulative orders, locking in leadership in their home markets.

Capital has followed the verified economics. Global private investment in autonomous driving reached $23.3 billion in the first four months of 2026, more than twice the total for all of 2025. Waymo closed a $16 billion Series D at a $126 billion valuation, with Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and DST Global participating. Autnmy AI, a research firm that updates its robotaxi ranking every 12 hours, gave Apollo Go 78.4 points on Aug. 6, ahead of Waymo’s 77.1, with the third-place competitor trailing by nearly 15 points.

The report says Shenzhen holds three advantages over Los Angeles. First, Shenzhen has both local legislative power and special economic zone legislative power, and enacted China’s first local regulation for driverless vehicles, the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Intelligent Connected Vehicle Management Regulations of 2022, which covers testing access, paid operations and accident liability. Los Angeles, in contrast, cannot write its own autonomous-driving rules. Second, Shenzhen offers dense, multimodal traffic: 18 million residents, high vehicle and e-bike ownership, and narrow urban-village roads where cars, e-bikes and pedestrians share the same space — a long-tail scenario in which a 360-degree-view driverless vehicle can outperform a human driver. Third, Shenzhen’s population is young, with a median age of 32, and its compact urban form produces strong short-distance commuting demand, making daily riders more receptive to robotaxis. Apollo Go currently operates in Shenzhen’s Nanshan, Bao’an and Pingshan districts.

Apollo Go has accumulated more than 22 million orders across 27 cities, with over 330 million kilometers of autonomous driving, including 220 million kilometers of fully driverless operation. The report describes this as infrastructure the company brings to Shenzhen.

On July 23, Apollo Go received Hong Kong’s first driverless testing permit, and on July 27 it began fully driverless testing on Hong Kong airport island — the world’s first fully driverless operation in a right-hand-drive, left-hand-traffic market. That system covers more than 70 countries and territories, including the UK, Japan, Australia and Singapore, home to over 2 billion people. On July 28, Apollo Go announced public road tests in London alongside Uber and Freenow, becoming the first Chinese self-driving company to test in that city. Waymo is also testing in London, putting the two leading firms under the same regulatory framework for the first time outside their home markets.

The report traces a “Shenzhen-Hong Kong-London” path: scale left-hand-drive operations in Shenzhen, validate right-hand-drive full driverlessness in Hong Kong, then enter one of the strictest right-hand-drive markets in London. Apollo Go has also begun fully driverless commercial operations in Abu Dhabi in January, in Dubai in March, and started road tests in Switzerland in June, with full driverless operation planned for the first quarter of 2027.

Shenzhen is developing into a replicable “city-level robotaxi solution,” the report says, but the real test appears in everyday scenes: a late-night worker calling a driverless car from a tech park, a shopper riding home from a mall, or a traveler napping in the back seat of a robotaxi on the way to an early flight.