Robotaxi & Tech Tour

Right now, in southwest Beijing, a Baidu Apollo robotaxi is gliding through an intersection with no one in the driver's seat. No hands on the wheel. No foot near the pedal. Just a car making decisions at 60 km/h using sensors that see in every direction simultaneously. This is not a pilot or a test — it's commercial service, operating across designated Beijing districts 24 hours a day.

Your companion helps you download the Luobo Kuaipao app, register an account using a foreign phone number (which is harder than it sounds), and hail a fully autonomous vehicle. The car arrives, the doors unlock, the screen on the seatback greets you by name, and you watch the steering wheel turn itself for the next 25 minutes. The fare is typically under $2.

From $15 per person: app setup and account creation help (the trickiest part for foreigners), the robotaxi fare itself (covered for the first ride; subsequent rides are payable in-app), companion narration on China's autonomous-vehicle regulatory framework and how it differs from Western caution, and a brief walking tour of the pickup neighborhood while you wait for the car to arrive.

Baidu Apollo currently operates robotaxis in Yizhuang Economic-Technological Development Area in southeast Beijing. We meet at Yizhuang Wenhua Yuan subway station (Line Yizhuang), and the pickup point is a 3-minute walk from there. The route from Yizhuang to most central Beijing destinations takes about 45 minutes — the robotaxi service area is currently bounded by a geofence, so the destination is chosen within the operational zone.

The Apollo robotaxis use a sensor stack that includes lidar (the spinning unit on the roof), radar, and visual cameras feeding into an onboard compute unit. Decisions are made locally on the vehicle, not in the cloud — which is why the car can navigate areas with poor cellular coverage. Your companion explains the major edge cases (construction zones, pedestrians ignoring crossings, electric scooters in bike lanes) and how the system handles them.

Mid-morning (10 AM–12 PM) or mid-afternoon (2 PM–4 PM) work best. The robotaxis run 24 hours but mid-day traffic in Yizhuang is light enough to give you a smooth ride. Rush hour (5–7 PM) is more interesting if you want to see the system handle congestion.

Baidu Apollo has logged tens of millions of kilometers of driverless commercial service across China since 2022. The Beijing operation has had no reported accidents involving injury. There is no safety driver in the car — the model is monitored remotely by an operations center that can intervene if needed, but during your ride you are alone with the vehicle. This is the experience that makes most guests pause.

We frequently bundle the robotaxi ride with a visit to a Xiaomi or NIO showroom (Yizhuang has both within a 10-minute taxi from the robotaxi pickup) or with a Beijing EV charging station tour. The full Beijing Tech Tour runs about 4 hours and covers robotaxi, an EV showroom, and digital RMB activation. From $40 per person all-in.