Robotaxi Tracker: Every City with Driverless Taxis (October 2026)

Robotaxis now carry paying passengers with nobody at the wheel in 17 cities. Eleven are in the United States, four in China and two in the United Arab Emirates. None is in Europe, although Europe was early with rules: Germany allowed driverless Level 4 operation in 2021.

We built a robotaxi tracker from operator announcements, company filings and regulator notices, one source per row, checked on 2 October 2026. 32 cities in 11 countries have robotaxis carrying passengers: 17 fully driverless and paid, 6 driverless with restrictions, and 9 with a safety driver on board. The table, the sources and the core coordinates of each service area are in the CSV at the end.

We also measured one thing the operators do not publish: how much of the road network around each service area is described in OpenStreetMap. In the fully driverless cities, a median of 23% of the road length within 5 km of the service core has a speed limit tag. In London and Hamburg it is above 90%.

How we sorted the cities

A robotaxi announcement can mean anything from a demo to a city-wide service. We sorted every city by what a member of the public can actually do today:

A city takes the most advanced status of any operator there. Las Vegas, for example, has one paid driverless service, one invite-only driverless service and one with safety drivers.

Fully driverless and paid: 17 cities

The largest service by area is Waymo's. On 13 May 2026 it reported more than 1,400 square miles (3,626 km²) across 11 cities, and its city list now has 15 cities with riders. In China, Baidu's second-quarter 2026 results put Apollo Go in 28 cities worldwide with 240 million fully driverless kilometres. Pony.ai had 1,975 robotaxis on 30 June 2026, and WeRide more than 1,800 at the end of July.

Driverless with restrictions: 6 cities

Wuhan is the reminder that a status can go backwards. It was one of the largest driverless fleets in the world until 31 March 2026, when many robotaxis stalled on the road at once. The city's service stopped, and China froze new robotaxi permits during a national safety review. Permits started again city by city in July.

Tesla also runs cars without anyone on board in Dallas and Houston, according to electrive, but has not said who can ride there. Those rows are in the CSV as driverless with restrictions.

Safety driver on board: 9 cities

Zagreb also has a paid service with an operator in the driver's seat, since 8 April 2026, at a promotional fare of €1.99. It sits under restrictions in our count because its driverless test rides are the more advanced service.

Announced next. Waymo lists 17 cities as coming, among them London and Tokyo, for 2027. Pony.ai has run driverless tests in Dubai since April 2026. We count a city only once riders are in the car.

The rules that decide where robotaxis drive

Robotaxis run where a regulator has created a permit for a car without a driver and has issued one. Europe has the first part in several countries and very little of the second.

Three things hold Europe back more than the law itself:

• Small series. The EU type approval covers small series of fully automated vehicles. The Commission's Automotive Action Plan of March 2025 promised rules for larger fleets and common rules for testing. On 8 June 2026, 18 member states signed up to cross-border testbeds, with €20 million for digital infrastructure.
• Permits on paper. The UK permit regulations have applied since May 2026. We found no published permit for a driverless passenger service by early October.
• Global type approval is new. UNECE's World Forum adopted the first global regulation for automated driving systems on 24 June 2026. It sets common safety requirements, from testing to monitoring in service, that national and EU approvals can build on.

In the United States, the rules are mostly set by states, which is why service follows the states that allow it, such as Arizona, California, Texas, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Nevada.

What the open map knows around each service area

A robotaxi drives on its operator's own high-definition map, built and checked inside the service area. The rest of the product runs on a normal road map: routing between pickup and drop-off, arrival times, the service-area geofence in the app, pickup points, and the planning tools that decide where to expand next. We explained the difference in HD maps for autonomous driving.

For that second layer we measured two tags in OpenStreetMap that a routing engine and a speed model use directly: maxspeed, the posted speed limit, and lanes, the number of lanes. For each of the 32 cities we drew a circle of 5 km radius around a point in the core of the service area and summed the length of drivable road with each tag, using the ohsome API on the OpenStreetMap snapshot of 27 July 2026.

Four findings stand out:

• The most advanced robotaxi cities have the thinnest open speed data. Beijing's Yizhuang district has a maxspeed tag on 2% of its road length, Wuhan on 0.2%, Guangzhou on 7%. In Nashville, Houston and Atlanta, the figure is 11 to 16%.
• European cities have speed limits mapped, lane counts much less. London (97%), Hamburg (94%) and Darmstadt (81%) have speed limits on almost every road. Lane counts cover 28 to 47%.
• Phoenix and Singapore are the best described. Phoenix has both tags on 75% of its road length, Singapore's Punggol on 81%.
• Coverage is growing fast where robotaxis run. In 29 of the 32 circles, the maxspeed share has risen since January 2020. Austin went from 11% to 44%, Las Vegas from 11% to 35%, Miami from 19% to 49%.

Roads without a tag still have a legal limit. Most countries have default limits, such as 50 km/h in German towns or a prima facie 25 mph on many US residential streets, and routing engines fill these in. The tags matter where the default is wrong: arterials, school zones, variable limits and new roads. That is the same data problem as Intelligent Speed Assistance in new European cars.

What this means for product teams

If you build the rider app, the fleet tools or the city-side planning for a robotaxi service, three points follow from the tracker.

• Treat the service area as data. It changes every few weeks in the US and can shrink, as in Wuhan. Store it as a versioned geofence and test pickups against the version that was live at the time of the request.
• Plan for a map you did not build. The vehicle's own map covers the drivable area. Arrival times, pricing and coverage analysis outside it run on open or commercial road data, and speed and lane tags vary from 2% to 97% between our cities.
• Check the local rule before the launch date. In Europe, an operating area or permit is approved per city, and in Germany per state. A shared map of permitted areas, service areas and road attributes saves rework when the first driverless permits arrive.

Measure the tags for your own service area

The ohsome API is free and returns length-weighted tag shares for any circle or polygon. This request gives the maxspeed share within 5 km of central Zagreb:

curl -X POST "https://api.ohsome.org/v1/elements/length/ratio" \
  --data-urlencode "bcircles=15.9775,45.8131,5000" \
  --data-urlencode "filter=type:way and highway in (motorway, trunk, primary, secondary, tertiary, unclassified, residential, living_street)" \
  --data-urlencode "filter2=type:way and highway in (motorway, trunk, primary, secondary, tertiary, unclassified, residential, living_street) and maxspeed=*"

Swap the circle for your own service-area polygon with bpolys. To see how far a vehicle gets from a depot or charging hub in a given time, draw it on the travel time map. Matching recorded vehicle traces to those roads is covered in what is map matching.

Method and limits

• City list: compiled by hand from operator press releases and blogs, company filings (SEC 6-K reports of Baidu, Pony.ai and WeRide), city and regulator notices, and news reports where no primary source exists. Checked on 2 October 2026. Each operator and city pair is one row in the CSV with its source and date.
• Left out: demonstrations of a few days, services for staff only, and deployments we could not tie to a 2025 or 2026 source. Apollo Go says it runs in 28 cities but does not publish the list, so only its cities with a recent source are in the table. Chongqing and the Apollo Go service in Beijing are not, for that reason.
• Status describes the most advanced service per city, as defined above. Fleets in one city can mix driverless and supervised cars.
• OpenStreetMap measure: one 5 km circle per city around a point we chose in the core of the service area (coordinates in the CSV), drivable roads from motorway to residential and their links, service roads and tracks excluded. ohsome clips ways to the circle. Ways are counted per carriageway, so dual carriageways count twice. The circle is a comparison window and is smaller than most service areas.
• What the measure does not show: the quality of the operators' own maps, which are not public, or the accuracy of the tags that exist.

The script is scripts/seo/blog-keyword-research/robotaxi-cities.mjs. We will update the tracker as cities change status.