Self-driving cars

Baidu's autonomous taxi efforts are showing signs of life and scale. The company clocked 1.4 million public rides in the first quarter, up 75% from last year, although not all were fully driverless.

True robotaxis only hit Chinese streets in February. To date, Baidu has logged 11 million cumulative rides, spread across 15 cities including Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but its global fleet is still modest at just over 1 000 cars.

Waymo, by contrast, has now completed 10 million fully driverless rides, half of which came just this year, and is currently doing 250 000 a week. As robotaxi players rack up mileage in a few concentrated cities, the real question remains: can anyone scale this?

All eyes will be on Tesla's long-awaited robotaxi rollout later this year. Despite the current LA riots, I'm personally cheering for Waymo.