WeRide Robotaxi GXR

WeRide, founded in 2017 in Guangzhou and listed on Nasdaq, is the robotaxi company that went abroad first and hardest. Where Waymo concentrates on the United States and Baidu on China, WeRide reported operations in 12 countries and autonomous driving permits in eight markets — China, Switzerland, the UAE, Singapore, France, Saudi Arabia, Belgium and the United States — as of its first-quarter 2026 results on 13 May 2026. Its global robotaxi fleet stood at about 1,300 vehicles on 30 April 2026, roughly 1,000 of them in China. The Gulf is the company's strongest overseas position. In Abu Dhabi, where WeRide launched with Uber in December 2024, service now covers about 70 percent of the city's core areas, and an October 2025 UAE permit removed the in-vehicle safety officer — the first city-level fully driverless commercial permit granted outside the United States. In April 2026 WeRide and Uber began Dubai's first fully driverless fare-charging robotaxi service with the Roads and Transport Authority; a February 2026 commitment covers at least 1,200 robotaxis across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh by 2027. In Southeast Asia, public service with Grab started in Singapore's Punggol district on 1 April 2026. The GXR is the vehicle behind that expansion, and its next generation is the more interesting machine. Built on WeRide's GEN8 platform with Sensor Suite 8.0, it pairs RoboSense's thousand-beam-class EM4 digital lidar — 17 times denser point clouds and up to 600 m of range, which WeRide says buys over 70 percent more reaction time at speed — with a solid-state E1 blind-spot lidar, and runs on the HPC 3.0 computer built around NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor. WeRide states HPC 3.0 halves the cost of the autonomous driving suite and cuts total cost of ownership by 84 percent. Production with Geely starts in the third quarter of 2026 with 2,000 units planned. The car is 5,018 mm long on a 3,100 mm wheelbase and is the first WeRide robotaxi to delete the front passenger seat in favour of cabin space. Revenue remains small next to the ambition: RMB 114.1 million (USD 16.5 million) in the first quarter of 2026, up 57.6 percent year over year, against RMB 6.18 billion (USD 895.6 million) of cash on hand at 31 March 2026. Unlike Pony.ai, WeRide has not published per-vehicle unit economics; its own profitability argument rests on the removal of safety officers in Abu Dhabi rather than on a disclosed daily revenue figure. Second-quarter and half-year 2026 results are due on 12 August 2026.

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