Dear friends,

It may be time to talk about robotaxis, or “driverless” taxi service. Not as a tech trend to get you excited, but as the next front in a battle that platform workers across Asia have been fighting for over a decade.

The struggles of ride-hailing drivers and delivery workers in China and across Asia are still unfolding. Still raw.

Yet, the rapid rise of robotaxis now threatens to upend this already precarious workforce once again. What took more than a decade to build; nascent labor organizations among app-based drivers may face another round of disruption, destabilizing the political formations workers have painstakingly built.

I want to resist the narrative of inevitability and to encourage activists to think strategically. Our labor built the platform economy, and that history provides a map for our next moves against robotaxis.

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Chinese Platform Drivers in Surviving Modes

In China, ride-hailing drivers have long worked under intense pressure to make ends meet. According to a report by the National Business Daily, multiple regions issued warnings since mid-2024 that platforms had flooded the market with overcrowded drivers. As a result, drivers’ daily revenues reportedly dropped sharply, pushing many to the brink.

A 2024 labor review compiled by an anonymous Chinese collective known as “Straw Mushroom Stewed Chicken” (草菇炖鸡), published by an international editorial group Chuang, documents what survival looks like under these condition.

In megacities like Beijing and Shanghai, male drivers have resorted to eating, drinking, and sleeping in their cars to save on rent, relying on paid bathhouses for hygiene. This gave rise to the “smelly car” trend on social media. Platforms like Didi responded with disciplinary measures and blacklisting features, rather than addressing the underlying dispatch algorithms or revenue-sharing models. At the same time, the workforce saw a threefold increase in women drivers, adding a gendered dimension to these conditions.

And still, workers pushed back. Before shutting down in mid-2025, the China Labor Bulletin's Strike Map recorded 25 driver protests in 2024 alone, nearly 40 percent of all transport and logistics collective actions that year. Drivers were organizing under crises.

Into this sitting, the robotaxis like WeRide and Apollo Go (which this article will focus on) arrived.

Robotaxis Stealing the “Rice Bowl”

Since its 2022 debut, Baidu’s Apollo Go has scaled rapidly across more than twenty Chinese cities. By early 2026, Apollo Go had begun operations in Dubai and partnered with Lyft in Europe.

Wuhan has become its primary laboratory—the first city to integrate autonomous vehicles into its highway system and urban grid at scale.

As reported by Baiguan and Chosun News, the competition is brutal. Pricing data from the Wuhan Economic Development Zone reveals an impossible competition for ride-hailing drivers. Though Apollo Go's official starting fare may be slightly higher than ride-hailing platforms, heavy subsidies and aggressive promotions have gutted actual prices. Passengers report paying 4–16 yuan for a 10-kilometer robotaxi trip, compared to 18–30 yuan with a ride hailer.

In mid-2024, a taxi company in Wuhan submitted a petition to the city’s transport bureau, accusing robotaxis of stealing the “rice bowl” (fànwǎn) of local drivers.

Among drivers, the vehicles earned a mocking nickname: shǎ luóbo : the “dumb radish.” The term refers to the machines’ awkward behavior in complex urban environments. The machines freeze at stray plastic bags, stall at confusing intersections, and create traffic jams while recalculating. Drivers joke about this. But beneath the humor lies a deeper anxiety.

For many in Wuhan, ride-hailing was already a fallback livelihood, entered after losing jobs in manufacturing or construction during earlier economic slowdowns. Ride-hail driving was the “last resort” rice bowl. Now even that is under threat.

Wuhan as a Laboratory for Our Struggle

We must look at China as a laboratory. What is happening in Wuhan is a preview, moving at unprecedented speed.

The rapid expansion of Apollo Go into the Middle East and Europe in 2026 (and WeRide into Southeast Asia) confirms that the global rollout is not a distant future. It is already here.

However, we have been here before. Our consent, given out of economic necessity, was the very fuel used to build the platform economy. Now that same dynamic is powering the shift to AI-driven autonomous vehicles.

We built these platforms with our labor. We have the right to decide whether they continue to run over our livelihoods.

As these companies go global, our resistance must do the same.

If the technology is identical in Wuhan and in Dubai, then our strategies for disruption must be shared across borders.

The strength of logistic and transport workers has always been our ability to disrupt the flow of the commodities and the city. With robotaxis even more dependent on predictable environments than human drivers ever were, this weakness in the system is an opening in ours.

The future of labor is a social struggle we have already been waging for a decade. We know this terrain. It is not too late to stop the robotaxis in their tracks.

Until next time,

Kriangsak

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