What if you hailed a taxi late at night on Gangnam-daero and a car pulled up with no one in the driver's seat? The scene is still unfamiliar, but robotaxis are a near future already taking shape across Seoul. Commercial operations are expanding in the United States and China, and companies are moving faster to make the Korean market — Seoul in particular — their next stage.
Waymo, Google's self-driving unit, is a leading example. The company set up a Korean entity in July of this year and is now working with Hyundai Motor (005380) on Level 4 autonomous driving technology using the Ioniq 5. No timetable has been set for a service launch in Korea, but its interest in the market is clear. Apollo Go, the autonomous driving platform of China's Baidu, also moved into Korea this year. Apollo Go logged more than 350,000 fully driverless rides in a single week at its peak in the first quarter, and cumulative rides topped 22 million as of April.
Pony.ai, a Chinese autonomous driving company, has teamed up with a local partner and announced plans to bring 200 Level 4 robotaxis into Korea by 2028. Several steps remain before actual commercialization, however, including safety validation and vehicle certification. When the robotaxi era truly begins will depend not only on how mature the technology is but on how quickly detailed rules and safety standards are put in place.
Seoul is drawing attention for more than the size of its market. For self-driving cars to run in a real city, hard-to-predict movements of pedestrians and two-wheelers must be linked with high-definition maps, communications networks, and data processing and control systems. Robotaxis are ultimately an industry that uses an entire city as a testbed, and once the service takes hold, the economic ripple effects are large, drawing data, software and location-based service companies into the ecosystem, well beyond simple vehicle sales.
On that score, the government's conditional approval in February of this year for Google to take 1:5,000-scale high-definition map data out of the country is also worth noting. The conditions are strict — masking military and security facilities and limiting coordinate markings, among others — but the case showed that map data is core infrastructure for mobility and location-based services. In the age of autonomous driving, the data that reads a city becomes part of its competitiveness.
Seoul's preparations are, of course, already showing results on the road. In November of this year, Level 4 autonomous taxis with no one in the driver's seat are set to begin operating around the Sangam area. The late-night autonomous taxi service in Gangnam, which began in September 2024, switched to a paid service in April of this year and then expanded its fleet from seven vehicles to 19 in August. That more than 6,000 rides followed even after the shift to paid service shows the potential for autonomous driving to move beyond technology demonstrations into a mobility service woven into daily life.
The significance of this trend goes beyond technology demonstrations. The global robotaxi service market is projected to grow to $168 billion by 2035. Responding to that industrial shift, the Seoul Metropolitan Government this year created a physical artificial intelligence category — covering robotics and autonomous driving — within its Vision 2030 Fund and committed 10 billion won in contributions. The aim is to broaden the growth base for future industries through investment spanning robotics and autonomous driving.
Once robotaxis take root, the ecosystem can expand beyond vehicle manufacturing into related industries such as data, communications, insurance and infrastructure. That can be a new growth opportunity for Seoul as well. The moment the steering wheel disappears, the taxi is not the only thing that changes. The map of a new industry may be redrawn. For Seoul to become an industrial hub where companies and capital gather, rather than remaining a testing ground for robotaxis, the city must prepare not only the technology but also regulations, infrastructure and the industrial ecosystem together at the city level.
