U.S. ride-hailing company Lyft said on Monday it will partner with China's Baidu to deploy robotaxis across Europe starting next year, marking the Chinese search engine giant's first foray into the European self-driven taxi sector.

Lyft partners with Baidu to bring Chinese driverless cars to Europe by 2026. Apollo Go robotaxis will deploy in Germany and UK first, scaling to thousands.

Lyft has only recently entered the European market with its acquisition of Freenow, announced in April. US markets including Phoenix, Austin and San Francisco already have robotaxi services from companies including Waymo and Tesla. Uber recently announced a global plan to deploy robotaxis with Lucid and Nuro starting next year.