EVwire brief: Freenow by Lyft and Baidu's Apollo Go have started testing autonomous vehicles in London.
The first Apollo Go RT6 robotaxis, Baidu's sixth-generation model, are now driving in the Borough of Brent in northwest London with safety operators on board. The test area mixes urban and suburban streets.
UPDATE: right on the same day, Uber & Baiduโs Apollo Go also announced the testing vehicles hitting the street in London.
Public riders are planned for 2027, pending regulatory approvals. The robotaxis will then operate on the Freenow app as a hybrid fleet, alongside the city's taxis and private hire drivers.
The RT6 out and about in Brent, home of Wembley Stadium.
Context: Baidu built the RT6 specifically for ride-hailing, and the UK is its second right-hand-drive market.
The first was Hong Kong, where Apollo Go received its first permit for fully driverless testing on July 23 and had vehicles on Airport Island roads four days later, with nobody behind the wheel.
London starts slower. Safety operators stay on board through the testing phase, which the companies say was shaped in close collaboration with Transport for London and the UK government's Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles.
"As a platform with deep roots in the taxi industry, our priority is ensuring that autonomous technology supports the professional drivers who keep London moving.
By integrating these purpose-built, autonomous vehicles from Baidu's Apollo Go into the Freenow by Lyft ecosystem, we will give Londoners more sustainable choices to travel, encouraging them to choose shared mobility services over personally-owned vehicles."
Baidu's Nan Yang called the London arrival "a defining milestone" in Apollo Go's global expansion:
"Testing our autonomous fleet in one of the world's most iconic and complex urban environments validates our technology's maturity and our commitment to this market. By combining our cutting-edge autonomous driving technology with Freenow by Lyft's local operational expertise, we are officially moving from vision to reality, together."
Are Londoners up for this?
Freenow had Censuswide ask 3,001 Londoners back in March.
58% said they would likely ride in an autonomous vehicle, and among under-35s support runs close to two thirds. The top reasons: excitement about the technology (51%), reliability (43%), and quiet time during the journey (41%).
Or, in the words of Zimmermann's LinkedIn post on the news:
"We're in this to earn the right to operate in such a complex, iconic city."
Apollo Go arrives with real scale behind it.
Baidu is a robotaxi heavyweight inbound for Europe
The service had given over 22 million rides by April, runs in 27 cities, and completed 3.2 million fully driverless rides in Q1 2026 alone, up 120% year over year.
Its fleet has covered more than 330 million autonomous kilometers (205 million miles). Over 220 million km (137 million miles) of those were fully driverless.
The London test is the first UK result of the partnership Lyft and Baidu signed in August 2025, which brings Apollo Go vehicles to Europe through Freenow, the Hamburg ride-hailing platform Lyft acquired a month before that.
Germany and the UK were named as the first target markets.
And the neighborhood is getting busy. Waymo announced last October that London will be its first European city, with a launch planned for 2026. Uber and Wayve are preparing their own London trials under the UK's accelerated pilot scheme, ahead of the full self-driving framework expected from late 2027.
Sources: Freenow by Lyft; Baidu; Thomas Zimmermann
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