Dubai and Abu Dhabi want 4k driverless cars, but the rollout hinges on public trust, insurance, and nuanced regulations

A clip of a driverless Uber stuck in the middle of a Dubai intersection, facing the wrong way while traffic moved around it, was shared more than 36k times this week. The clip, posted on Instagram, shows the limit of where self-driving technology stands today: the vehicles do well on familiar, mapped routes but can struggle when something unexpected happens. The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) says it is investigating with the operator. The incident raises the questions regulators and operators will face more often as fleets grow: who is responsible when an autonomous vehicle fails on a public road, and are the rules and the roads ready for it?

The current state of play: Dubai had 160 self-driving vehicles on its roads as of last month. It’s targeting 4k by 2030, when it wants a quarter of all trips to be autonomous. Baidu’s Apollo Go signed with the RTA in April last year to put 1k driverless cabs on Dubai’s roads by 2026, its first expansion outside Greater China. WeRide has been running driverless taxis on Yas Island since November 2025. It has since expanded with Uber into Khalifa City, Masdar City, and Rabdan and signed up to run robotaxis and robobuses on Ras Al Khaimah’s Al Marjan Island. Pony.ai has its own partnership with the RTA. Uber is the common link, offering both WeRide and Apollo Go rides through its app.

The rollout has not been smooth sailing: Besides the viral videos of things going wrong, the rollout hasn’t kept pace with targets. Dubai’s commercial launch in March put 100 driverless taxis on the road, limited to Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah, after the war forced WeRide to pull its fleet. As of last month, the whole emirate had 160 self-driving vehicles, against the 1k Apollo Go alone had targeted by this year.

Part of the reason is that the cars only work inside set zones: Most of the self-driving vehicles on UAE roads are Level 4: they drive with no human input, but only within a defined area.

SOUND SMART- Level 4 autonomy means a vehicle can drive itself without a human taking over, but only within an approved zone, known as its operational design domain. Level 5, which can drive anywhere, doesn’t exist commercially yet.

That limit can work in an operator’s favor: A tight zone with strong demand and busy vehicles can be worth more than wide coverage with weak demand, according to Simon-Kucher. In other words, “maximum autonomy does not automatically create maximum commercial value,” the consultancy writes. That is a problem for any plan to make autonomous vehicles cover a whole city: the more ground an operator covers, the harder it becomes to make money.

Abu Dhabi has a later target, but its rollout started earlier. It wants autonomous vehicles to handle 25% of trips by 2040, a decade after Dubai. But it issued the Middle East’s first two fully driverless commercial permits in November 2025. One went to WeRide, operating with Uber and Tawasul. The other went to K2’s AutoGo, operating with Baidu’s Apollo Go. By February, more than 120 Level 4 vehicles were running without safety drivers, and the WeRide and Uber network covered about half of the capital’s core urban area. AutoGo moved to full commercial operations on Yas Island in March, with Reem, Al Maryah, and Saadiyat next.

Are we ready for autonomous vehicles?

K2 says Abu Dhabi already has what’s needed to run fleets at scale, infrastructure-wise. We asked about dynamic traffic signals, digitized roads, and systems that let vehicles communicate with the road. “All of these exist today in Abu Dhabi,” Waleed Alblooshi, vice president of strategy at Abu Dhabi’s K2, told us earlier this year.

Dubai is also in the process of building that infrastructure: The RTA is connecting all 620 of the emirate’s signalized junctions directly to vehicles so cars can receive live signal and road data. Full deployment is expected in 2027-2028. Separately, an AI-run signal system was due to be installed at about 300 junctions by the third quarter of this year.

And its testing capacity is ready: In September, the RTA opened Dubai Mobility Labs at Dubai Silicon Oasis. It’s a proving ground that puts vehicles through 248 traffic and weather scenarios before they reach public roads. Germany’s Dekra will run it for its first three years, and WeRide, Pony.ai, and Tesla have already tested there. Dubai still clears roads for some trials, though. In late October, it shut three lanes of Emirates Road during peak hours so robotaxis could be tested without other traffic.

Some argue driverless vehicles will make UAE roads safer. One estimate cited by Al Tamimi & Co partner Andrew Fawcett puts the possible reduction in road fatalities at up to 90%.

But there are downsides: Robotaxis “still occupy road space and contribute to congestion,” Martin Tillman, founder of transport and mobility planning advisory firm TMP Consult, tells us, especially on the empty trips between passengers.

It’s more of a trust problem: “The biggest gap we see right now is in consumer education,” Alblooshi says. “Riders might feel anxious at first with the experience, but they will grow to see its value.”

Are the rules ready?

National rules exist, but permits are still issued emirate by emirate. The Cabinet approved national rules in September for testing, inspecting, registering, and licensing autonomous vehicles. Operating permits are still issued by each emirate. Dubai has had a dedicated law since 2023. Abu Dhabi grants permits only once a vehicle passes safety, readiness, and performance testing, Consilium Advisors founder Ankita Dhawan tells us. A license doesn’t carry over from one emirate to another, so an operator expanding to a new emirate goes through approval again.

In Dubai, the operator is liable for any injury or property damage its vehicles cause, Dhawan says. The operator then has to pass that risk on to the companies that supply the technology.

That arrangement will decide how quickly fleets grow: “Operators will expand supply based on whether liability can be passed back up the chain when a loss is legitimately attributable to the technology provider, and whether insurers will underwrite fleet-level and software-failure risk at a price the unit economics can absorb,” she says. She expects that “as it becomes more mainstream, liability questions will settle and the framework will become more predictable.”

Abu Dhabi has moved fast: K2 went “from conceptual to operational” in less than a year, Alblooshi said. K2 says none of the permitting requirements have been “particularly challenging.” At the time we spoke, Alblooshi said the company still relies on a safety driver in the passenger seat and a command center that monitors every vehicle. That’s because the stakes are much higher with buses: a failure on a fixed route carrying 20 passengers creates a different liability problem from a failure in a two-seat robotaxi.

Buses are the next regulatory question: K2 and WeRide are preparing 20-seat robobuses for Yas Island and UAE University. Even K2 says they will need their own rules. “We do need a distinct regulatory framework,” Alblooshi said.

What’s next

Tillman sees “shared autonomous services integrated with high-capacity public transport” as the better long-term play. NYU Abu Dhabi professor of civil and urban engineering and director of the CITIES Research Center Monica Menendez also agrees that the vehicles are “most useful when they help complete journeys that the main network cannot serve as conveniently.” That means connecting with the metro and buses rather than competing with them. It also addresses a gap we’ve flagged in earlier coverage: experts told us the overall effectiveness of the public transportation network build-out will largely be judged on how easy it is for people to get to and from the station.

A wider rollout in any case depends on “public trust, which drives demand, and regulatory enablement, which unlocks supply through permits, approved operating zones, and routes,” Dhawan tells us. That trust is “fragile,” she tells us. It depends on how operators behave and how they respond to incidents like this week’s.