Dubai’s autonomous taxi experiment has officially entered its commercial era. As of this week, that driverless car gliding through Jumeirah with nobody behind the wheel will cost you exactly Dh5.
For weeks, Dubai’s self-driving taxis were the city’s best-kept open secret. You get a fleet of empty-seated cars offering free rides while quietly logging kilometres across two of its most photographed neighbourhoods. That trial period ended this week. The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) confirmed on Wednesday that autonomous taxi rides across Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah now carry a flat Dh5 fare.
The service runs on a partnership between RTA, Dubai Taxi Company, and Chinese tech giant Baidu, through its autonomous ride-hailing platform, Apollo Go. Until now, rides were complimentary. This was a deliberate move by RTA to let residents and tourists experience driverless travel without the pressure of a fare meter. That grace period has ended. 
“RTA offers the autonomous taxi service for public use in Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah, in partnership with Apollo Go, for a fare of Dh5,” the authority announced in a social media post.
How to Catch a Ride
Booking one is straightforward, at least for now. Riders need the Apollo Go app, downloadable from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. But you need to be at a location within the current service zones of Jumeirah and Umm Suqeim. RTA has signalled that the booking net will widen soon, with plans to bring Bolt and other ride-hailing apps into the fold as the programme scales.
Notably, Dubai marks Apollo Go’s first deployment outside China, making the emirate ground zero for testing how the technology performs beyond its home market.
Fully Autonomous, No Exceptions
This isn’t semi-autonomous tech with a human backup. In January 2026, Apollo Go made history as the first company to secure a licence for fully driverless testing on Dubai’s streets, with no safety driver required. That same month, Baidu opened its Apollo Go Park in Dubai, a dedicated hub for managing and maintaining the local fleet.
Behind the scenes, Dubai Taxi Company, which already operates a conventional fleet of more than 6,000 taxis and limousines, is overseeing autonomous vehicles via its existing monitoring systems and operational network. The rollout is deliberately staged. Fifty self-driving vehicles will hit the road in the first year, with the fleet scaling to more than 1,000 in the years that follow.
This Dh5 fare is a milestone in Dubai’s Self-Driving Transport Strategy, an ambitious plan to make a quarter of all journeys in the emirate autonomous or smart by 2030.
And Apollo Go arrives in Dubai with serious mileage behind it. Globally, the platform had completed over 20 million rides by February 2026, with its vehicles clocking more than 300 million autonomous kilometres, over 190 million of those entirely without a human safety driver.
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