Guangzhou is one of China's busiest robotaxi testbeds, hosting all four major operators at once. WeRide has piloted driverless taxis with the Baiyun fleet since 2019; Pony.ai won a dedicated 100-car taxi licence in 2022; DiDi gained a remote, safety-operator-free testing permit the same year; and Baidu's Apollo Go also runs here. By 2025 several operators had moved to fully driverless commercial service.
The atlas documents 8 projects in Guangzhou, the earliest dating to 2010: 2 with a documented success, 6 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is peer-reviewed (1 entry) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Guangzhou is actually doing.
Computed from the 8 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Two lines opened in 2010, and only one of them was ever measured from outside. The bus rapid transit corridor began running that February over 22.5 kilometres carrying 43 routes, with a farecard shared with the metro, GPS on every bus and a dispatch centre that pages a station attendant when a scheduled service fails to arrive. An independent evaluation the following year credited it with travel times 29 per cent better for bus riders and 20 per cent better for motorists, about 86,000 tonnes of carbon avoided a year, and roughly 800,000 riders a day — a passenger flow ranked second in the world behind Bogota's. It carries around a million trips a day now, and no independent re-evaluation has updated those figures since. That November the Zhujiang New Town people mover opened just before the Asian Games: 3.94 kilometres, nine stations, unattended from the start and among the first fully driverless lines in China, carrying about 39,700 riders a day by 2023.
In 2012 the city started rationing the cars themselves. The quota system caps new passenger-car registrations each month and splits the allocation between a free lottery and a paid online auction — a hybrid, unlike Beijing's pure lottery or Shanghai's pure auction, with a share reserved for new-energy vehicles. It is still running, allocating tens of thousands of indicators as recently as 2026. It is also the one part of the record with published academic scrutiny, and the scrutiny is unflattering: the two channels distribute the burden of the cap unevenly between applicants, and ownership kept growing, because a household that loses a lottery or cannot afford a winning bid registers a second car instead. A cap on new plates is not a cap on cars.
The platform years came in two waves. The open data portal opened in October 2016 with some 300 datasets and was rebuilt in June 2023 with more than a thousand across sixteen sectors and over 150 million cumulative records; use is free and non-discriminatory, but the terms require crediting the platform, forbid reselling and ask users to register their intended use, which is not an open licence in the sense the atlas's licence ladder uses the word. In March 2020 Suihaoban bundled social insurance, medical insurance, housing fund, marriage registration and vehicle services behind one digital identity, reporting 12 million registered users within two years and 23 million by its fifth anniversary — a count of accounts, not of services completed inside the app rather than at a counter. Four months later the water authority began wiring roughly 35,000 kilometres of pipes, 64 treatment plants and nearly 40,000 drainage units into a single waterlogging network, grown to 6,860 monitoring stations by 2024 and named a national exemplary case. It forecasts and it dispatches crews; it does not itself open a gate or start a pump.
The most recent layer is the most automated and the least examined. Nansha's Phase IV container terminal opened in July 2022 as the Greater Bay Area's first fully automated terminal — automated quay cranes handing containers to guided vehicles routed by a scheduling system the operator calls a super brain, with automated yard cranes in place of on-site crews — and the first in China built for river-sea-rail transfer, handling 1.81 million containers in the first half of 2024 with what the operator reports as roughly 70 per cent lower manpower. A fifth phase on the same model was approved in 2025. On the streets, the city has become one of China's busiest robotaxi testbeds, with driverless pilots since 2019, a dedicated hundred-car licence and a safety-operator-free testing permit both granted in 2022, and several operators running fully driverless commercial service by 2025.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2010 to 2022. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Guangzhou's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
The one figure in Guangzhou's record produced by somebody outside the project is now fifteen years old, and it describes a corridor that has since grown by roughly a quarter. Everything added since reports itself: registered accounts, containers handled, monitoring stations installed, manpower reduced. The exception is the plate quota, where independent work exists and points the other way — toward substitution rather than restraint. That makes the open questions unusually easy to name. Whether anyone re-measures the bus corridor, which is old enough now to be a natural experiment in what a fifteen-year-old rapid transit line does to a city. Whether the drainage network ever moves from forecasting to actuation, which is the step that separates a warning from a decision. And whether the data portal's terms ever become a licence, since asking users to register their intended use is the opposite of the thing the portal is named after.
Where Guangzhou appears in the atlas's own analysis.
One city the atlas reads next to Guangzhou — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Guangzhou threads below, not counted out of them.
China's two rationing capitals and two robotaxi hubs: Beijing runs a pure lottery for car plates where Guangzhou mixes lottery with auction, and Beijing wired the roadside where Guangzhou bet on the vehicles.
Every editorial link from Guangzhou's entries into another city, strongest first. Each one is a statement about two projects, not about two cities — the three above are the ones the atlas is willing to make at city level.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Guangzhou, China.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/guangzhou/ (last verified 2026-08-27). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.