Driverless taxis are now available for hire in suburban Beijing, marking a new chapter in intelligent transport, according to media reports on Monday.

Beijing earlier in March granted licenses to Chinese tech giant Baidu and Toyota-backed autonomous vehicle startup Pony.ai to run fully driverless robotaxi services.

This is the first time that a fully autonomous fleet of vehicles has been granted permission to operate in a world-class metropolis, the reports said.

Previously, robotaxis were required to have a human driver in case of an emergency. However, the new permission will allow the two companies to operate robotaxis with just the passengers inside.

The two companies, both among the leading players in China's autonomous driving industry, have each deployed 10 autonomous vehicles in a 60-square-kilometer area in Yizhuang, located in the southern suburb of Beijing.

Baidu plans to expand its autonomous ride-hailing services to 65 cities in 2025 and 100 in 2030.

The market size for China's self-driving taxi service is expected to reach 1.3 trillion (188.6 billion U.S. dollars) by 2030, accounting for 60 percent of the country's ride-hailing market at that time, according to forecasts from global consultancy IHS Markit.

Despite current limitations that require robotaxis to operate in designated zones due to complex road conditions and lack of legal shortfalls, their coverage is expected to expand with the accumulation of data and improvements in algorithms, Yale Zhang, managing director at Shanghai-based consultancy Automotive Foresight, told China Daily.

The robotaxi is also expected to pave the way for the development of private autonomous vehicles, which have the potential to be a revolutionary technology capable of transforming people's lives, Zhang added.

(With inputs from Xinhua.)