Skip to main content

[Why Korea 23] Korea's Self-Driving Cars Are Miles Behind. Can It Catch Up?

Self-driving car navigating Seoul's Gangnam district at night, symbolizing Korea's autonomous driving industry

In 2000, at the turn of the millennium, I got my driver's license.

It was more of a symbolic gesture than a practical one. In Seoul, public transit gets you almost anywhere, so I never really planned on buying a car. I got the license anyway, because I was convinced the future was about to arrive — self-driving cars, people commuting through the sky. That's what "millennium" meant to me at the time.

Twenty-six years later.

Drones now deliver packages. Delivery robots roll down sidewalks. Cars have gone electric, and AI has started encroaching on the driver's seat itself.

And yet the one thing I was actually waiting for — a car that drives itself, with a person in it — still isn't part of daily life.

Meanwhile, I keep seeing headlines about robotaxis picking up passengers somewhere in the world.

So where does Korea actually stand?

I went looking for an answer.

The numbers were more sobering than I expected.

The Rest of the World Is Already on the Road

In the U.S., Waymo is running driverless robotaxis for paying passengers across multiple cities. China isn't far behind — Baidu's Apollo Go and similar services are scaling up fast, city by city.

Korea has started too. In Seoul's Gangnam district, a paid robotaxi service is already carrying real passengers. But it's still confined to a specific area and a specific time window.

Here's roughly where the three countries stand right now:

๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ United States ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ณ China ๐Ÿ‡ฐ๐Ÿ‡ท Korea
Flagship service Waymo Apollo Go, etc. Seoul Robotaxi
Current stage Large-scale commercial Large-scale pilot & commercial Limited commercial & pilot
Approach Expanding across cities Expanding city by city Confined to specific zones/hours

One number makes the gap real.

In 2025, Waymo logged more than 250,000 paid rides in a single week. Seoul's Gangnam robotaxi, over about 17 months, carried a cumulative 7,754 passengers.

These aren't directly comparable figures — different scale, different conditions.

But the direction is unmistakable.

The U.S. and China are already scaling autonomous driving into a real service. Korea is still running commercialization and safety validation side by side, in a much smaller sandbox.

Autonomous Driving Is a Battle of Experience

Self-driving cars learn on the road.

Rain. Construction zones. A pedestrian who steps out without warning. A car that cuts in unexpectedly. The system only gets sharper by living through all of it, over and over.

Which is why mileage matters so much.

According to a Korean government comparison released in November 2025, Korea's autonomous driving companies had logged a combined total of about 13.06 million km. Waymo, by contrast, had already passed 160 million km — and Baidu, around 100 million km.

And the gap has only widened since. Waymo doubled that figure in roughly six months, crossing 320 million km by February 2026. Baidu passed 300 million km around the same time.

Bar chart comparing cumulative autonomous driving distance — South Korea, Baidu Apollo Go, and Waymo, as of February 2026

That's a real difference.

One foreign company alone has driven far more distance than Korea's entire industry combined.

But here's a question worth sitting with.

Is autonomous driving really just a numbers game — a matter of who drove the most?

Why Is Korea Still So Slow?

Korea's slow pace isn't just about missing technology.

Putting a self-driving car on real roads takes more than engineering — it takes safety standards, legislation, insurance frameworks, and a clear answer to a much harder question: when there's a crash and no human was really in control, who's responsible?

The carmaker? The company that built the self-driving system? The platform running the service?

Korea has approached this cautiously. Pilot zones have expanded, and real-world testing has scaled up — but the actual work of assigning legal responsibility for autonomous-vehicle accidents has only just entered its serious phase.

Which suggests the final piece of the puzzle for autonomous driving isn't just the car driving itself.

It's also making sure someone can be held accountable when something goes wrong — and that passengers feel safe enough to get in.

So Korea Started Driving Again

In February 2026, Korea's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport unveiled its 2030 Mobility Innovation Growth Roadmap.

This time, the plan doesn't stop at self-driving cars. It ties together autonomous vehicles, urban air mobility (UAM) and drones, carbon-neutral transportation, everyday mobility, and AI-connected urban design — an attempt to redraw the entire mobility industry at once.

In Gwangju, the government is scaling up city-wide autonomous driving trials. In Seoul, a limited but real robotaxi service is already carrying passengers.

It's still too early to say Korea has closed the gap with the world's leaders.

But the question itself is starting to shift.

From "Can Korea build a self-driving car?" to "How fast can Korea rack up real-world experience and scale it across the industry?"

So, Why Korea?

Put Korea's autonomous driving industry on a world map, and right now, it's playing catch-up from far behind.

We've already seen the gap in the numbers.

But Korean cities are a different kind of test.

Narrow alleys, chaotic intersections, dense traffic where cars and pedestrians move through the same space at the same time — layered on top of some of the densest telecom and transportation infrastructure anywhere.

Driving fewer miles and driving in a harder place are two different stories.

Could that complexity end up becoming an advantage for Korean companies?

The answer gets more interesting once you look at the companies actually building this technology.

The future I waited for 26 years ago still hasn't fully arrived.

Maybe the future isn't late. It's just arriving in a shape none of us quite pictured back then.

Curious about Korea?

So am I.

Key Takeaways

  • As of a November 2025 Korean government comparison, Korea's autonomous driving companies had logged a combined 13.06 million km — versus Waymo's 160 million km and Baidu's 100 million km. By February 2026, Waymo and Baidu had each passed 300 million km, widening the gap further.
  • Seoul's Gangnam robotaxi has carried 7,754 passengers over about 17 months with zero accidents caused by the autonomous system, and moved to paid service in April 2026.
  • The gap traces back to regulation more than technology: pilot zones have grown, but a government task force to define liability in autonomous-vehicle accidents only started serious work in 2026.
  • Korea's 2030 Mobility Innovation Growth Roadmap (announced February 2026) targets Level 4 full autonomous driving commercialization by 2027 and UAM public service by 2028.

Further Reading

์ดํˆฌ๋ฐ์ด (EToday) – Korea to Commercialize Full Self-Driving Next Year, Aiming for "Top 3 Global Autonomous Driving Power" (Korean-language source) https://www.etoday.co.kr/news/view/2559986

์„œ์šธ๊ฒฝ์ œ (Seoul Economic Daily) – In the Age of Autonomous Driving Competition, Korea Alone Is Braking (Korean-language source) https://www.sedaily.com/article/20019610

์ „์ž์‹ ๋ฌธ (Electronic Times) – Gangnam's Late-Night Robotaxi Goes Paid Starting April, Fleet Set to Expand (Korean-language source) https://www.etnews.com/20260315000040



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

[Why Korea 13] The Country That Had No Guns. How Did It Become the World's Armory?

July 2026, Ankara, Tรผrkiye. The President of Korea took the stage at NATO's defense industry forum. He said this: "Let's move beyond simply trading weapons systems, toward a partnership where we research together, produce together, and operate together." NATO's Secretary General called Korea's defense industrial base "fantastic." After that speech ended, I couldn't shake one thought. A little over seventy years ago, this country barely had a gun to its name. 1950: We Had Nothing Before dawn on June 25, 1950, North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel. The Korean military had the will to fight, but not the weapons to fight with. Mostly surplus M1 rifles supplied by the US military after World War II — no tanks worth the name, barely any artillery, and next to no anti-tank weapons or ammunition reserves. North Korea pushed south behind Soviet T-34 tanks. In the opening days of the war, Korea's forces collapsed with almost nothing to stop the...
Post a Comment
Read more

[Why Korea 07] Why Did Korea Make AI a National Strategy?

Recently, the Korean government unveiled its vision of becoming one of the world's top three AI nations. At first, it sounded like just another government initiative. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized it was something much bigger. It wasn't simply an AI policy. It was a strategy for Korea's future. So why did Korea decide to make AI a national priority? AI Isn't Creating a New Industry. It's Transforming Existing Ones. Korea has never been a country rich in natural resources. Instead, it built its economy through technology and manufacturing. Today, industries such as automobiles, semiconductors, batteries, and shipbuilding remain the backbone of the Korean economy. But AI is beginning to change how those industries compete. Cars are no longer judged only by engine performance. Software continuously updates vehicles, and AI increasingly assists drivers. Factories are changing as well. Instead of relying only on the experience of skill...
Post a Comment
Read more

[Why Korea 12] How Korea's 'Dying' Shipyards Roared Back?

My younger brother lives in Ulsan. Ulsan was once the city with the highest average income in all of Korea. That was when shipbuilding, automobiles, and petrochemicals were all running at full speed at the same time. Then shipbuilding began to crack, and the mood shifted. Foreclosure listings flooded the market, and the streets grew quiet. These days, my sibling says things seem to be slowly coming back. The worst is probably over. But it's still hard to say the local economy has truly recovered. The news talks about Korea's shipbuilding revival. But the temperature on the ground rises more slowly than the headlines suggest. So how did the crisis begin — and how did the industry get to where it is today? The End of the Boom: Korea's Shipbuilding Collapse (2008–2016) In the early 2000s, Korea was the world's number one shipbuilder. A significant share of the world's vessels were being built in shipyards in Geoje, Ulsan, and Mokpo. Order backlogs were overflowing, and...
Post a Comment
Read more