ABU DHABI - More than 10,000 autonomous taxis and delivery vans are expected to be operating across the United Arab Emirates next year, and orders for the vehicles have already been placed, a senior adviser to the country's president said on Tuesday.
Faisal Al Bannai, adviser to the UAE President and secretary general of the Advanced Technology Research Council, gave the figure on the opening day of AI Everything Abu Dhabi, a two-day summit at the Adnec Centre, Khaleej Times reported. "Not 1,000, not 5,000, 10,000-plus," he said.
"This is not maybe the roadmap. We've already placed the orders for these platforms," Mr. Al Bannai said, according to Khaleej Times. The reports from the summit did not say which companies would supply the vehicles, how the fleet would divide between passenger taxis and delivery vans, or how it would be spread across the emirates.
If that scale is reached, he said, the UAE would become the largest deployer of autonomous taxis and vans outside China. In remarks reported by Gulf News, he said the country would have thousands of taxis operating by this time next year and would be "the largest deployer. After China," while acknowledging that geopolitical complexity, regulatory concerns and safety risks may remain obstacles.
The vehicles already run at a smaller scale in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, Mr. Al Bannai said, after moving through testing and validation, and the expansion would take autonomous mobility in the country from hundreds of vehicles into the thousands. Abu Dhabi expanded Level 4 autonomous taxi services on Yas Island earlier this year, and Dubai has launched commercial autonomous taxi service in areas including Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah, Khaleej Times reported. Abu Dhabi Mobility has said the capital was the first city in the Middle East and North Africa to begin commercial operations of fully driverless Level 4 vehicles.
Several companies are already competing for that market. WeRide runs robotaxi fleets in Abu Dhabi and Dubai through partnerships with Uber and Grab, and Baidu's Apollo Go has deployed autonomous taxis in Dubai, according to a Bastille Post report republished by the UAE-China Chamber of Commerce. Momenta, the Mercedes-backed Chinese company, told Reuters last week that it plans to put robotaxis on the road in Dubai next year. Dubai opened a dedicated test ground for autonomous vehicles at Dubai Silicon Oasis on Sept. 27.
Mr. Al Bannai presented the vehicles as part of a wider push into what he called physical AI, in which intelligent systems move beyond software to operate vehicles, robots and other equipment. He said thousands of robots were expected to be working across the UAE next year in inspection, monitoring and hospitality. "Next year, UAE and Abu Dhabi especially, the level of robots you will see in the street, the level of vans, robots in the mall, in your compound, in other areas, you will not be able to miss them," he said.
In a conversation on stage with Becky Anderson, the managing editor of CNN's Abu Dhabi bureau, he said the country's edge lay in having "a regulator bold enough to understand the risks and move with agility" and clients willing to experiment with new uses, Entrepreneur Middle East reported.
