On October 30, the Transport Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region announced that Apollo Go had been approved to conduct an inter regional test of autonomous vehicles in Kowloon East (designated sections of Kai Tak Development Zone and Kowloon Bay) in accordance with the Road Traffic (Autonomous Vehicles) Regulations.
This is also the fourth time that Apollo Go has expanded its test area in Hong Kong since it expanded the area in April this year and launched a small-scale manned test on the Airport Island, conducted a road test in Dongchong in June, and entered the southern area of Hong Kong Island in August.
A spokesman for the Transport Department said that since the launch of the test in North Lantau at the end of 2024, Apollo Go has made remarkable progress and achieved four technological leaps: simultaneous operation of multiple vehicles, passenger carrying test, road expansion and speed increase. This testing project spans across Kowloon City and Kwun Tong districts, covering the Kai Tak Development Area, allowing the system to collect more testing data to evaluate the performance of autonomous vehicles in various road conditions and cross district operations.
It is worth mentioning that Apollo Go is very responsive to Hong Kong policies and is promoting the testing and development of autonomous vehicles in Hong Kong in a safe and orderly manner. On September 17 this year, Hong Kong's 2025 Policy Address clearly pointed out that the SAR government has established a regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles. This year, three regions will be approved for autonomous vehicle testing. With the goal of autonomous vehicle to travel across regions and connect other means of transportation, it will accelerate the unmanned and large-scale development of autonomous driving in Hong Kong, achieve commercial operation as soon as possible, and promote the industry to explore overseas markets, especially the right steering vehicle market, with Hong Kong as the platform.
Under the policy support, Apollo Go took the lead in achieving autopilot testing in many regions of Hong Kong, which will also provide an important reference for the promotion of its autopilot technology in the global right-hand drive market. At the same time, Apollo Go continued to recruit and cultivate local talent teams, carried out a series of industry university research cooperation, held a number of campus technology lectures, automated driving online course training and other innovative technology and science popularization activities, so that the public can understand and experience automated driving technology, and build an innovative technology ecology of automated driving with all sectors of society, help Hong Kong develop new quality productivity, and realize Hong Kong's vision of becoming an international innovation and technology center.
In addition to making rapid progress in Hong Kong, Apollo Go is also accelerating its overseas layout, landing in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, cooperating with Uber, Lyft and Swiss Post, and continuing to explore more regions and markets outside Chinese Mainland in Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
As of August, Apollo Go has entered 16 cities around the world, including Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, etc., providing more than 14 million services in total, and driving more than 200 million kilometers safely. In the future, Apollo Go also plans to bring the world's leading AI and automatic driving technology to more cities to provide more users with green, low-carbon, safe and comfortable automatic driving travel services.
