> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.selfdrivinginsider.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Europe's First Fully Driverless Robotaxi Didn't Launch in London — It Launched in Zagreb - URL: https://www.selfdrivinginsider.com/europes-first-fully-driverless-robotaxi-didnt-launch-in-london-it-launched-in-zagreb/ - Published: 2026-10-03T09:56:45.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-03T09:56:45.000Z - Author: Nico For two years, the story of Europe's first truly driverless robotaxi has been written as a three-way race between familiar names: Waymo, Wayve and Uber, and Baidu, all converging on London with vehicles that, for now, still carry a human safety operator behind the wheel just in case. While that race has dominated the headlines, it has already been quietly won — not in London, not in Paris, and not by any of those three companies. It was won in Zagreb, Croatia, population roughly 800,000, by a Chinese company most European readers have never heard of. On September 30, Pony.ai and its local partner Verne began running passenger trips through the Croatian capital with genuinely no one in the driver's seat — not a safety operator poised to intervene, not a remote supervisor watching through a video feed for that specific car, just the vehicle's own system handling a real 22-kilometre route with paying riders inside. Ten days earlier, a second Chinese company, WeRide, had secured Spain's first national robotaxi operating license, putting Madrid on a similar path before the year is out. Between them, the two developments suggest the actual frontier of driverless Europe looks nothing like the frontier most coverage has been describing. What Actually Happened in Zagreb Pony.ai and Verne, a Croatian mobility company, launched what they called Europe's first commercial robotaxi service back in April 2026, using safety drivers while the system built up a track record on public roads. By the time the companies felt confident enough to remove that safety driver on September 30, the fleet had already logged more than 200,000 kilometres and several thousand customer rides, with an average passenger rating of 4.7 out of 5\. Riders book through Uber, which supplies the app and the customer base while Verne runs day-to-day operations and Pony.ai provides the underlying self-driving system. The route itself is deliberately unglamorous and practical: 22 kilometres connecting Verne's headquarters, Zagreb's central business district, and Franjo Tuđman Airport — the kind of predictable, well-mapped corridor that favours an early driverless rollout over a dense, chaotic historic centre. The vehicles are Pony.ai's seventh-generation robotaxi platform, built around an Nvidia Drive AGX compute system and what the company calls a safety-certified Halos operating system, with 360-degree sensor coverage designed with redundancy so that a single sensor or compute failure doesn't leave the car blind. Not Alone: WeRide's Breakthrough in Spain Zagreb's milestone did not happen in isolation. On September 10, Spain's Directorate General of Traffic granted WeRide the country's first national Level 4 robotaxi operating license under Spain's new ES-AV regulatory framework — a joint permit shared with Uber and AVOMO, the autonomous-vehicle unit of Moove Cars Group. Madrid becomes WeRide's fourth Uber partnership city globally, and the company has said it expects to move from an initial deployment of safety-driver-supervised GXR vehicles to full public commercial service before the end of 2026. The timing of the two announcements, nine days apart and both tied to Uber as the distribution platform, is not a coincidence so much as a pattern. WeRide now holds AV licenses or approvals across nine countries — China, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Singapore, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the United States — and has set a public target of "tens of thousands" of vehicles across 15 cities by 2030\. Madrid, a market that draws roughly 100 million tourist arrivals a year on top of its existing ride-hailing demand, was a deliberate choice rather than an accident of geography. Why Uber Keeps Showing Up in Both Stories Neither Pony.ai nor WeRide is trying to build a European consumer brand from scratch, and that choice is central to how both companies have moved faster here than the US-based names most readers associate with robotaxis. Each supplies the autonomous driving technology and, in Pony.ai's case, works with a local operating partner; Uber supplies the already-installed app, the existing rider base, and crucially, the regulatory relationships and local market knowledge that come from already running conventional ride-hailing in these cities. That is a meaningfully faster path into a new country than building a standalone consumer service and a fleet from zero — the same partnership logic this publication has tracked with Waymo, Wayve, and Baidu's parallel approaches to London. Pony.ai's broader numbers show how much weight the strategy is now carrying. The company has logged more than 100 million autonomous kilometres globally, over 40 million of them fully driverless, and is targeting 3,500-plus robotaxis worldwide by the end of 2026 — with nearly half of new deployments landing in overseas markets rather than China. A partnership with Toyota alone is expected to put roughly 1,000 Toyota bZ4X-based robotaxis into service this year. Pony.ai's overall overseas deployment pipeline, including more than 2,000 vehicles planned for Europe with Uber, now exceeds 4,000 robotaxis. The Money Behind the Momentum Part of why both companies can afford an aggressive European push right now is that their home-market economics have started to turn a corner. Pony.ai's robotaxi revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025 grew 160% year-on-year, with fare-charging revenue specifically up more than 500%, and the company posted a net profit of $75.5 million for that quarter on the back of reaching unit-economics breakeven in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Full-year 2025 revenue came in at roughly $90 million. Those are still small numbers next to Waymo's reported $350 million in annualised revenue, but they mark a shift from a company burning cash to prove a technology into one that can point to profitable city-level operations as it funds expansion elsewhere. Why Croatia and Spain, Not France or Germany The choice of Zagreb and Madrid over Paris, Berlin, or Amsterdam reflects the same calculation that shaped the robotaxi industry's earlier US rollout in Phoenix and Austin: smaller or faster-moving regulatory environments let a first mover establish a track record before tackling the continent's largest and most scrutinised markets. Spain's new ES-AV framework gave WeRide a clear national licensing path that larger EU economies, still finalising their own autonomous vehicle rules, could not yet offer. Croatia's smaller regulatory apparatus and Verne's existing local relationships let Pony.ai move from a safety-driver pilot to full driverless status in five months, a timeline that would likely face far more friction in a market the size of France or Germany. That mirrors a dynamic this publication has covered on the regulatory side before: the EU's own Autonomous Vehicle Act, creating a bloc-wide Level 4 pathway, does not take effect until January 2027\. Until then, individual member states are free to move at their own pace, and Croatia and Spain have simply moved first. What This Means for the London Race London's three-way contest between Waymo, Wayve and Uber, and Baidu and its ride-hailing partners remains the more closely watched story for English-language coverage, largely because of the city's size and symbolic weight as Europe's presumptive robotaxi capital. But Zagreb and Madrid's progress reframes what "first" actually means on this continent. None of the three companies racing toward London has removed its safety operator yet, pending the UK's secondary legislation under the Automated Vehicles Act 2024\. Pony.ai already has. WeRide is positioned to within months. By the time London's regulatory path clears, true driverless operation in Europe may no longer be a novelty — it may simply be something Croatia and Spain already did first. What to Watch Whether WeRide actually removes its Madrid safety drivers before year-end, matching the timeline it has set publicly — a second confirmed instance would make the Zagreb milestone look like the start of a pattern rather than an isolated first. How quickly Pony.ai expands beyond its single 22-kilometre Zagreb corridor into the rest of the city's operating area, which the companies have already flagged as the next step. Whether France, Germany, or the Netherlands respond by accelerating their own national frameworks rather than waiting for the EU's January 2027 bloc-wide rules — the kind of competitive pressure that Chinese AV companies moving first in smaller markets tend to create for larger, slower-moving neighbours. The story European readers have been told about robotaxis is that the real milestones happen in London, or occasionally in Paris. For now, that story is simply inaccurate. The first fully driverless robotaxi ride on European soil happened on a 22-kilometre stretch of road in Zagreb, run by a Croatian startup and a Chinese AI company most people in Western Europe have still never heard of. **Related:** London Is About to Get Its First Robotaxi — and Multiple Giants Are Racing to Launch First · Self-Driving Cars in Europe: What's Legal and What's Not in 2026 · Tesla's Cybercab Finally Launched — Then NHTSA Opened an Audit Within Hours Quick comparison: Zagreb vs. Madrid | | Zagreb (Pony.ai + Verne) | Madrid (WeRide + AVOMO) | London (Waymo / Wayve / Baidu) | | ----------------- | ------------------------- | --------------------------- | ---------------------------------- | | Fully driverless | Yes, since Sept 30, 2026 | Targeted by end of 2026 | Not yet — safety operator required | | Platform partner | Uber | Uber | Uber and/or Lyft | | Legal basis | Croatian national rules | Spain's ES-AV framework | Pending UK secondary legislation | | Kilometres logged | 200,000+ since April 2026 | Early-stage, safety drivers | Testing phase |