9 Firms Eating Tesla's Robotaxi Lunch
By Goldsea Staff | 04 Nov, 2025

Tesla's robotaxi dreams have made it a trillion-dollar company but in the real world 9 autonomous driving companies around the world are farther along.

Everyone knows about Elon Musks's dream to turn every single Tesla ever sold into a potential robotaxi producing cash for its owner.  That grandiose concept, coupled with Tesla's installed base of several million cars on the road, has given a trillion-dollar valuation to a company that trails at least nine other autonomous-driving carmakers in terms of actual progress as a robotaxi service. 

Artist's conception of a Baidu Apollo robotaxi carrying a passenger in Shanghai.  (Image by ChatGPT)

Those 9 other companies are all operating in large cities around the world, carrying actual paying customers to their destinations without human intervention.  Some blame Tesla's endlessly slipping timetables on Musk's stubborn insistence cutting costs by not augmenting cameras with lidar to detect difficult-to-see obstacles.  Others blame Musk's arrogance in refusing to subordinate the design of any Tesla model to the engineering demands of fully autonomous urban operations, or to bureaucratic demands and sensibilities.

Pony.ai uses Nvidia's Drive Orin technology to achieve reliable, low-latency performance and accelerate scalable deployment of self-driving trucks and robotaxis in Chinese and US test markets.  (Image from Nvidia)

Whatever the reason, Musks's goal of seeing the global fleet of Teslas becoming money-making robotaxies on their off hours may well be receding into the rearview mirror as rivals establish themselves as routine fixtures in cities like Los Angeles, Shanghai, Las Vegas, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Miami and Moscow.

And recent successful IPOs by China's WeRide and Pony.ai, which is working with Nvidia, suggests investors may start defecting to other more promising robotaxi ventures with much more room on the upside.

Here’s a tight, sourced roundup of the 10 autonomous-driving ventures that are farthest along today (robotaxis / public deployments and real-world service experience). For each I give the headquarter nation and the most significant achievement (what proves they’re “farther along”). Sources after each item.

Here's that list of leading robotaxis around the world courtesy of ChatGPT:

1. Waymo — United States
   Achievement: Commercial robotaxi service (Waymo One) operating at scale in multiple U.S. metro areas (Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles), plus ongoing fleet manufacturing plans to scale capacity. (Fast Company)

2. Baidu (Apollo Go) — China
   Achievement: Apollo Go operates large city robotaxi fleets across multiple Chinese cities (millions of rides — cumulative rides in the multi-millions) and has expanded testing/permits outside the mainland (e.g., Hong Kong). (Technology Magazine)

3. Pony.ai — China / United States (dual presence)
   Achievement: Large commercial robotaxi fleets and city-level driverless permits in major Chinese Tier-1 cities; rapid fleet expansion and plans for thousands of robotaxis (PonyPilot program). (pony.ai)

4. AutoX — China
   Achievement: One of China’s earliest large robotaxi deployments; secured fully unmanned passenger permits (e.g., Shanghai) and has scaled into multiple Chinese cities with sizeable fleet counts. (Gasgoo)

5. WeRide — China (international ops too)
   Achievement: Operates 24/7 autonomous ride-hailing pilot routes in core areas of Guangzhou, deployed robotaxi fleets internationally (e.g., Abu Dhabi) and partnerships to expand on platforms like Uber. (weride.ai)

6. Motional — United States (HQ Boston)
   Achievement: Long-running commercial robotaxi partnership with Lyft (driverless rides in Las Vegas and planned multi-city rollouts); one of the first global commercial driverless ride-hail services via a major rideshare network. (Motional)

7. Zoox (Amazon) — United States
   Achievement: Purpose-built, wheel-to-wheel robotaxi design and moving into serial production (new California production facility) and staged commercial launches / city testing (San Francisco, Las Vegas, Austin, Miami). (Reuters)

8. Cruise — United States
   Achievement: (Historically one of the industry leaders) launched limited commercial driverless rides in San Francisco and built a large test/operations fleet — though recently has been restructured and scaled back by GM after regulatory/operational setbacks. (Important to note: Cruise was among the first to run public driverless rides in SF but its status changed during 2024–25.) (The Robot Report)

9. Yandex — Russia
   Achievement: Long track record of self-driving testing and early robo-taxi pilots (Innopolis, Moscow), plus many millions of autonomous miles accumulated in tests — proven urban robotaxi trials in real passenger service. (Reuters)

10. Tesla — United States
    Achievement: Massive installed base of cars running Tesla’s Autopilot/FSD software (wide fleet data collection), public FSD beta trials and early limited robotaxi pilots / state testing permits — Tesla remains a major contender because of fleet scale and active robotaxi plans (and early pilots). (Tesla)

Quick note on how I chose these

• Focus = “real-world robotaxi / driverless service + significant fleet/testing scale.” I prioritized companies that have (a) commercial or widely available pilot robotaxi services, (b) city permits / large fleets, or (c) purpose-built robotaxi production plans — not just lab demos.

• Some firms (Cruise) were pioneers but recently faced regulatory/organizational setbacks; I’ve flagged those statuses above. China’s robotaxi ecosystem (Baidu, Pony.ai, AutoX, WeRide) is especially active and leads in the number of public city deployments. (Technology Magazine)