Baidu keeps ramping up its autonomous driving ambitions. The Chinese tech company made its name in search engines and still relies greatly on search ads for revenues. But it’s hoping that its heavy bet on autonomous driving will pay off down the road.
Apollo Go, Baidu’s robotaxi service, aims to be in 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030, the firm’s co-founder and CEO Robin Li said on an analyst call Wednesday.
That’s a big batch of licenses that Baidu needs to obtain from local regulators. And eventually, the business’s sustainability comes down to how many of these permits grant commercial operations to Apollo Go, and how many rides the service could actually garner.
For now, Li estimated that Baidu is “probably the largest robotaxi service prov …
