Chinese search giant Baidu challenges Google’s Waymo’s driverless vehicles and Musk aims for a $1tn pay package

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you from Barcelona, where my diet has transformed at least half my body into ham.

We are on the verge of the global arrival of self-driving cars. Next year, major firms from both the US and China will deploy their robotaxis to metropolises around the world, in major expansions of their existing operations. These companies are posturing in the press like male birds fighting for the same mate; the dance sets the stage for the global competition to come.

On the US side, there’s Waymo, Google’s driverless venture. The company has invested billions of dollars in Waymo in the past 15 years. The company opened its robotaxi service to the public in June 2024 in San Francisco after years of testing and has been rolling it out steadily since. Now, vehicles are very visible in most of Los Angeles, and they are going to Washington DC, New York City, and London next year.

On 2 November, the Chinese internet search giant Baidu issued a challenge to Google. Baidu announced that its autonomous vehicle subsidiary, Apollo Go, regularly conducts the same number of rides as Waymo: 250,000 each week. Waymo reached the milestone in the spring.

The majority of Chinese electric vehicles, even without self-driving software, cost a fraction of those made by US companies. Building each Waymo vehicle costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, experts estimate, though the exact figure is not known. The CFO of Pony AI, a leader in autonomous vehicles in China, told the WSJ: “Our vehicle’s hardware cost is much, much lower than Waymo’s.”

Google now needs to convince future customers that it is the higher-quality option to achieve a return on its billions of dollars of investment in Waymo.

Google is using a discrepancy in transparency as a point of differentiation. There is far less publicly available data on Baidu’s cars, which raises questions about the trustworthiness of its safety record. Baidu itself claims its vehicles have suffered “not a single major accident” in their millions of miles of driving. Google pointed out in a statement to the Wall Street Journal how extensive its disclosure to US transportation authorities has been in a story about the success of Chinese self-driving companies.

But Apollo Go, which has let its taxis loose in Dubai and Abu Dhabi as the gulf states court tech deals of all stripes, isn’t Waymo’s only challenger. The wheels of WeRide, another Chinese autonomous vehicle company, have touched down in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. All of the significant players in the Chinese market are expanding in Europe, Reuters reports. Cars made by the firm Momenta and deployed by Uber are slated to start driving in Germany in 2026. WeRide, Baidu and Pony AI also have plans to begin robotaxi service in various European locales in the near future. Many more people are about to see self-driving cars in the course of their daily lives.

After the first question of self-driving cars – can we make one that works? – the question now becomes: who will dominate the market?