Apollo RT6 vs Didi Robotaxi in 2026

Apollo RT6

Baidu's Apollo RT6 is the company's sixth-generation autonomous robotaxi: a purpose-built battery-electric vehicle (a cross between an SUV and a minivan, with a detachable steering wheel) on Baidu's Apollo Galaxy / Xinghe self-driving platform, powering the Apollo Go fully-driverless commercial ride-hailing service across Chinese cities and some international markets. There is no consumer price: it is a robotaxi service vehicle, not sold to consumers.

Baidu manufactures it without relying on a third-party automaker at roughly 204,600 RMB (about $28,600) per vehicle, about half the cost of the prior generation: a verified per-vehicle build cost (from Baidu's disclosures), not a consumer price. It is one of the Chinese commercial-at-scale anchors of the robotaxi cluster.

Didi Robotaxi

Didi Autonomous Driving, the autonomous-vehicle subsidiary of Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing, is a distinct Level-4 robotaxi-stack developer (not a ride-hailing aggregator), integrating its own stack into Didi's network in a captive structure paralleling the Waymo Driver. There is no consumer price: it is a robotaxi service, not sold to consumers.

It launched a fully-driverless robotaxi service in Guangzhou's demonstration zone in December 2025 and runs a GAC-Aion joint venture (Guangzhou Andi Technology) with an R2 production model. Several verified-vs-claimed cap-flags apply: the paid-versus-free status of the December 2025 Guangzhou service is not explicitly confirmed in sources and should not be asserted as paid commercial; the reported 3,000-plus vehicles, eleven cities, and 80-million-plus cumulative kilometers are company-reported test-fleet figures, not commercial-revenue numbers.

On verification posture, Didi Autonomous Driving is a private subsidiary of Didi Chuxing (which delisted from the NYSE in 2021), so its robotaxi metrics carry a weaker private-company, Chinese-market-disclosure verification posture than the NASDAQ-listed Pony.ai and WeRide. The registry records it at early, zone-limited driverless commercial maturity.