Moscow to Get 200 Robotaxis by the End of 2026, Half of Them Open to All Passengers

Deputy Transport Minister Vladimir Poteshkin said at the "Digital Solutions" forum that about 200 robotaxis will operate in Moscow by the end of 2026. According to RB.RU, roughly 100 of them will be available to any passenger, not just participants in closed programs. Self-driving cars are currently being tested in three locations across the country. TASS reported the statement.

What we know and what we don't

The numbers sound specific, but the details are still thin. The report gives no operator name, no list of districts, no fares, and no information on whether a safety engineer will ride in the cabin. It is also unclear how the second hundred vehicles will operate. A test or limited mode is a reasonable guess, but it has not been officially confirmed.

The timeline is tight. At the time of the statement, less than three months remained in the year. If some of the vehicles are already running in test mode, the goal looks realistic. If the fleet has to be built from scratch, 200 cars in a single autumn would require serious logistics: assembly, sensor installation, calibration, and training for dispatchers and tech support.

Key parameters of the announcement:

• Target fleet: about 200 robotaxis in Moscow by the end of 2026.
• Open to all passengers: about 100 vehicles.
• Format of the other roughly 100 vehicles: not disclosed.
• Current tests: three locations in Russia.
• Source: Vladimir Poteshkin, Deputy Transport Minister, "Digital Solutions" forum, via TASS.

The scale in context

For a megacity with millions of taxi rides a month, 200 vehicles is a pilot-sized number. By comparison, Waymo was already operating more than a thousand self-driving cars in several US cities in 2025, while China's Baidu Apollo Go and Pony.ai are expanding their fleets by the hundreds. Moscow's plan is closer to early commercialization than to a mass market.

For Russia, though, it marks a shift from demonstrations to a service. Self-driving cars have been tested in Moscow for more than a year, including with passengers in selected districts. Opening a hundred vehicles to anyone who wants a ride would mean the technology is moving beyond narrow pilots. It would then have to be judged as a transport product: by pickup time, price, reliability and the number of incidents.

What could get in the way

The first problem is weather. Moscow in winter means snow, road chemicals, worn lane markings, and dirt on lidars and cameras. A launch that falls in November–December would be a serious stress test for the perception system.

The second is regulation. Self-driving transport in Russia operates under experimental legal regimes, and questions of liability in accidents and insurance remain sensitive. Opening access to the general public makes those questions practical.

The third is economics. A driverless taxi beats a conventional one on cost per kilometer only with high utilization and cheap fleet maintenance. With a fleet of 200 vehicles, that is hard to confirm for now.

What to watch before year-end

For passengers, the main question is where exactly they will be able to hail a car and how much it will cost compared with a regular taxi. For the market, a different question matters more: who will be the operator, and whether several services will compete. For the industry, the most honest indicator is open statistics: the number of rides, the share of trips without operator intervention, and the number of stops and crashes.

If districts, fares and the actual number of vehicles in service are named by January 2027, the announcement will have turned into a working service. If not, the 200 cars will remain a target on paper.