Baidu’s Apollo Go has received a Level 4 autonomous driving permit in Switzerland for AmiGo, a robotaxi service it is running with Swiss Post’s PostBus, putting the Chinese tech giant ahead of Waymo and Tesla in deploying driverless vehicles into European public transport.

The Federal Roads Office (FEDRO) special permit covers an 80 km² service area across three eastern cantons, and Baidu says the project is on track to become the largest planned automated public transport operation of its kind in Europe.

What FEDRO actually approved

AmiGo is an on-demand autonomous mobility service jointly developed by Apollo Go and PostBus, the bus operator of Swiss Post. On June 12, Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) announced that FEDRO granted the service a special operating permit for Level 4 operations in Eastern Switzerland.

Open-road testing began on June 1, 2026, covering roughly 80 km² across the cantons of St. Gallen, Appenzell Ausserrhoden, and Appenzell Innerrhoden. For now, the vehicles still run with a safety operator on board.

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The permit confirms that AmiGo’s vehicles and autonomous driving system meet Switzerland’s safety and quality requirements, but it stops short of authorizing fully driverless rides today. Baidu describes the approval as the framework for a step-by-step rollout rather than a green light for empty-seat operations.

“The FEDRO permit provides the framework — with clear requirements, defined responsibilities, and the objective of learning from operations for the next steps,” said Jürg Röthlisberger, Director of FEDRO.

The next phase will be a closed-group user trial, followed by initial rides without safety operators “once all safety evidence is fully provided.” Regular operations bookable through the AmiGo app are targeted to start in 2027.

The RT6 robotaxi behind AmiGo

AmiGo is being deployed using Apollo Go’s RT6, the same purpose-built robotaxi Baidu first unveiled in 2022 with a detachable steering wheel. Each RT6 is fully electric, carries up to three passengers, and is fitted with more than 30 sensors for environmental perception and onboard data processing.

The steering wheel is designed to be removed once the service transitions to fully autonomous operations — the same hardware story Baidu has been telling for years, now pointed at a European market.

Baidu is leaning on Apollo Go’s China scale to make its case. The company says Apollo Go provided millions of fully driverless rides in the first quarter of 2026, with weekly rides peaking above 350,000 in March, a 120% year-over-year increase. As of April 2026, cumulative rides for the public topped 22 million, across 27 cities, with fleets having logged more than 330 million autonomous kilometers, including over 220 million fully driverless.

A robotaxi land grab in Europe

Baidu is not moving into Europe alone, and that is the real context here. Alphabet’s Waymo is expanding to London with public robotaxi rides and has named London and Tokyo as its first international markets. Waymo recently raised $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation to fund an expansion to more than 20 cities.

The difference is the route to market. Waymo is launching a commercial ride-hailing service. Baidu is embedding directly into a national public transport operator, positioning AmiGo as a complement to existing PostBus service “particularly in areas where conventional services reach their limits.”

“With AmiGo, we are making automated mobility in public transport tangible,” said Stefan Regli, CEO of PostBus. Nan Yang, VP of Baidu and GM of its overseas intelligent driving unit, called the permit “a strong validation of our technology.”

Tesla, which has promised robotaxis in multiple markets for years, has no equivalent Level 4 regulatory clearance in Europe. It is currently rolling out FSD (Supervised), its level 2 driver-assist system, across the continent.

Electrek’s Take

As we are often focused on Tesla and Waymo in the West, Baidy has managed to ramp up to 22 million public rides with Apollo Go in China. That operating record is exactly what lets Baidu walk into a Swiss regulator and walk out with a Level 4 permit, while companies still talking about “supervised” autonomy in their home market cannot.

What’s clever here is the go-to-market. Rather than fighting for ride-hailing licenses city by city, Baidu plugged into PostBus, a national transit operator that brings regulatory trust, depot infrastructure, and a built-in service mandate. Riding the public-transport rails is a faster path to driverless deployment in Europe than competing head-on with local taxi rules, and it gives Baidu a reference customer for the rest of the continent.

The caveats are real. AmiGo still has a safety operator behind the wheel, the steering wheel hasn’t come out yet, and “regular operations from 2027” is the kind of timeline that tends to slip in autonomous driving. The closed-group trial and the “once all safety evidence is fully provided” language mean the hard part — removing the human — is still ahead.

Still, the broader signal is hard to miss: the most aggressive robotaxi expansion into Europe right now is Chinese, and it’s happening through the front door of a public transit agency. If AmiGo hits its 2027 target, who else in Western Europe says no to the same deal?

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