Uber's first European robotaxi still has a driver in it, and that is the whole story

Uber began selling autonomous rides in Europe for the first time this week in Zagreb, in a service run with the Chinese developer Pony.ai and the local operator Verne [s1c1]. Every ride has a licensed safety operator sitting behind the wheel [s1c2], which means what Uber actually shipped is a booking channel rather than a driverless car.

The source material is blunt about this. The cars were already running: Verne launched what it calls Europe's first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb in April, and says it has completed thousands of rides since, operating daily [s1c3]. That number is Verne's own and was not broken down [s1c4]. The new element is the channel, the same cars now bookable through an app most riders already have [s1c5].

The division of labour is conventional for a market entry. Pony.ai supplies its Gen-7 robotaxi system, Verne owns the fleet and runs ground operations, Uber handles the app and the rider experience [s1c6], formalising a three-way partnership the companies announced in March [s1c7]. Pony.ai, founded in 2016 and listed in New York and Hong Kong, calls its system a vehicle-agnostic "Virtual Driver" and has until now deployed it mostly in China [s1c8]. Verne has been working on autonomous ride-hailing in city traffic since 2019, including the regulatory side [s1c9].

So the stack is not the bottleneck being managed here. The companies declined to say how big the Zagreb fleet is or when the safety operator might come out from behind the wheel, framing both as gradual and tied to meeting local rules plus Uber's own safety checks [s1c10]. Europe's rules are still taking shape and have generally kept a human in the loop for longer than in the United States, where regulators are weighing whether to permit cars with no steering wheel at all [s1c11]. Other entrants face the same phasing: WeRide has said it will bring a robotaxi service to Denmark, and the startup Bliq has won approval to run driverless cars in Finland [s1c12].

That has a cost consequence operators should not gloss over. With one paid operator per vehicle per ride, the labour line is at least that of a human-driven trip, so the phased configuration cannot undercut ordinary ride-hailing on cost [s1d1]. The value on offer during this phase is data and regulatory standing, not margin.

For Uber the logic is unchanged since it sold its own self-driving unit: be the app that every robotaxi operator plugs into and take a cut, a position it has built through deals including one with Waymo in the United States [s1c13]. Annie Duvnjak, Uber's global head of autonomous mobility operations, called Zagreb a first step and said the company wants "to bring AVs to millions of riders and build the world's largest platform for AV deployment" [s1c14]. Pony.ai chief executive James Peng described the arrangement as its joint deployment model, aiming at "a viable path for scaling autonomous mobility" and progress towards fully driverless operations [s1c15]. Verne chief executive Marko Pejkovic said daily experience in Zagreb would help the company reach other European cities [s1c16].

Two things to watch. The companies said next European locations will be named later this year [s1c17], which will show whether the model travels or whether Croatia was a permissive one-off. And the more informative disclosure would be the first city where the operator's seat is empty, along with a fleet count to put the ride totals in proportion [s1c10].