WeRide has broadened its partnership with Geely’s commercial vehicle unit, Farizon New Energy Commercial Vehicle Group, aiming to speed up robotaxi production worldwide.
The companies also introduced an upgraded, production-ready Robotaxi GXR and said they plan to deliver about 2,000 vehicles by 2026.
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Deployment is expected across both domestic and overseas markets, as part of efforts to expand commercial robotaxi services.
Mass production of the updated GXR is due to start in the third quarter of 2026.
The Chinese autonomous driving company said its global robotaxi fleet stood at 1,023 vehicles as of January 2026.
With the additional GXR units, the firm expects its operational robotaxi fleet to exceed 2,600 vehicles this year, within a longer-term target of rolling out tens of thousands of vehicles globally by 2030.
The upgraded GXR uses WeRide’s GEN8 autonomous driving system, based on its Sensor Suite 8.0.
The company said the system includes a thousand-line LiDAR that lifts point-cloud resolution by 17 times and extends detection range to 600m, “two to three times that of mainstream industry solutions”.
It added that the longer range delivers more than 70% additional reaction time in high-speed scenarios and supports operation in heavy rain or dense fog.
The vehicle is built on Farizon’s AI-enabled drive-by-wire chassis, using Farizon’s manufacturing and supply chain.
The firms said this could cut assembly time from around one hour to under ten minutes and reduce overall vehicle cost by a further 15%.
Farizon CEO Mike Fan said: “Our partnership with WeRide is not only a precise integration of technology and resources, but also a clear example of Farizon’s strategic transformation from manufacturing to providing comprehensive ‘intelligent manufacturing + services’ solutions.”
WeRide previously launched the mass-produced GXR in October 2024 on Farizon’s SuperVAN platform, before fully driverless commercial operations began in Beijing and later Guangzhou.
The GXR is currently operating in Guangzhou, Beijing and Abu Dhabi, with public passenger services in Dubai and Riyadh.
Fully driverless services are set to launch in Dubai later this month, while Singapore’s GXR is wrapping trials ahead of a 1 April 2026 public debut as WeRide expands Robotaxi rollouts globally.
WeRide founder and CEO Tony Han added: “This deepened strategic collaboration between WeRide and Geely Farizon marks our shift from a product-level partnership to an integrated ecosystem, and is a significant milestone in WeRide’s global Robotaxi deployment.”
