China's Baidu is looking to expand its presence in the autonomous vehicle market worldwide, so in 2026 it will begin delivering its driverless taxis to Europe through a partnership with American ride-hailing company Lyft.
According to CNBC, the robotaxi will initially be launched in the UK and Germany, with plans to roll out thousands of vehicles across Europe.
It is noted that until last week, Lyft had a very weak presence in Europe, until it closed a deal to acquire German ride-hailing company FREENOW for $200 million, which also specializes in ride-hailing and operates in more than 150 cities in nine countries, including Ireland, the United Kingdom, Germany and France.
Lyft and Baidu said the introduction of driverless cars is "pending regulatory approval," so it's not yet known whether Lyft will offer Baidu's robo-taxis through the FREENOW app or through a different product.
Last month, Baidu also partnered with Uber to launch a self-driving taxi service on its platform outside the US and mainland China, with a focus on the Middle East and Asia. The project is scheduled to launch by the end of 2025. The partnership also includes Europe, although a launch date in that region has not yet been announced.
As for Lyft, the deal could strengthen its presence in the region as it competes with Uber and Bolt. This year, Uber in the UK signed a similar partnership with Wayve (which develops technology for driverless cars) to begin testing fully autonomous rides as early as spring 2026. As you know, since 2021, Baidu has launched its own robo-taxi service in major cities in China, allowing users to call Apollo Go cars through an app.
As we will recall, Chinese tech giant Baidu recently announced that it is opening up the source code of its generative language model Ernie. This will be the biggest discovery by the Chinese AI industry since the release of DeepSeek and could significantly change the situation in the global market. Although Baidu previously opposed opening up the source code of its models, the success of DeepSeek has forced it to reconsider its strategy.
Read also: Uber invests $300 million in Lucid to launch 20,000 robo-taxis