Zagreb just became the first city in Europe where you can climb into a robotaxi with nobody behind the wheel. Not a demo on a closed track. Not a safety driver hovering over the controls. Real passengers, public roads, an empty driver’s seat.
Pony.ai and Verne began the trials on September 10, 2026, running invited passengers along a 22-kilometer route that links Verne’s headquarters and one of Zagreb’s main business districts with Franjo Tuđman Airport. Remote operators keep watch from a control center, but nobody drives. Nobody rides up front to grab the wheel. For a continent that has talked about driverless cars for a decade, the symbolism is hard to miss.
From supervised to truly driverless in five months
The speed of the move is the story. Verne launched Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service back in early April 2026, with an onboard AV operator riding along in every car. Rides became bookable through Uber in Zagreb on August 19, running on Pony.ai’s autonomy stack in ArcFox T5 Alpha electric cars.
Since April, the fleet has logged more than 200,000 kilometers and carried several thousand paying customers, who gave the service an average rating of 4.7 out of 5. That’s the groundwork. You don’t pull the safety operator out of the car after 200,000 uneventful kilometers unless the data says you can.
Verne CEO Marko Pejković put it plainly: “Five months ago, we launched Europe’s first commercial Robotaxi service. We are now taking the next step, moving from autonomous driving with an onboard AV operator toward fully driverless operations.”
Right now the driverless rides are free and limited to invited passengers, and they can’t be booked through the app yet. The routes will widen over the coming months until they cover the whole Zagreb operating area. Think of September as the proof-of-concept phase and the next few months as the rollout.
The machine doing the driving
The trial vehicles are Pony.ai’s seventh-generation Level 4 robotaxis. The stack runs on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX hardware with a safety-certified DriveOS, 360-degree sensor coverage, and the kind of redundancy layers that autonomous driving has always promised: backup systems for the backup systems, fail-operational design so a single fault doesn’t strand the car.
Pony.ai founder and CEO Dr. James Peng said the milestone marks an important step in the company’s international growth, combining Pony.ai’s Virtual Driver with Verne’s local operations. It’s worth remembering that Pony.ai has been running robotaxis in Chinese cities for years. This is the company exporting its most mature product to European roads — and European roads, with their tram tracks, medieval street grids, and weather, are a stricter test than the grids of Guangzhou.
Verne, meanwhile, is backed by Rimac — yes, that Rimac — and has built more than 60 prototypes of its own bespoke two-seater robotaxi. The Pony.ai partnership is the commercial engine; the Verne vehicle is the longer-term play. Having both in the pipeline is a luxury most robotaxi companies can’t afford.
Why the airport route matters
Start where the demand is real. A 22-kilometer run from the business district to Franjo Tuđman Airport is the kind of trip travelers make every day — predictable, high-value, and painfully sensitive to reliability. Miss a flight because a robotaxi hesitated at a roundabout and the experiment is over.
Picking the airport first says Verne is confident the service works where it counts. It also gives the company a controlled corridor to perfect before it spreads across the city. Every rider becomes a data point; every smooth airport transfer becomes a story people tell their friends.
For travelers, the practical meaning is simple. Within a year or two, landing in Zagreb could mean stepping into a car with no driver and a flat fare, no language barrier, no tip arithmetic. Airport transfers are the beachhead. The beach expands from there.
Uber is circling — and Dara Khosrowshahi just rode in one
Five days before the September 10 milestone, Uber and Pony.ai widened their partnership to more than 2,000 robotaxis across five European cities — with Zagreb the only city named so far. Then Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi showed up at the Rimac campus this week, rode in the back of a driverless Pony.ai robotaxi alongside Marko Pejković, and made it known that Uber intends to invest in Verne once certain milestones are met.
That’s about as clear a signal as corporate partnerships give. Uber already lists Zagreb robotaxi rides in its app. A strategic investment on top of that turns a vendor relationship into something closer to a joint venture for the European market.
The sequencing matters for investors too. Pony.ai targets more than 3,500 robotaxis globally by the end of 2026, with a deployment pipeline of over 4,000 vehicles. The company isn’t treating Europe as a side project; it’s treating it as the next growth market. And with Switzerland already carrying passengers and Madrid mapped out for Spain’s first service, the European robotaxi map is filling in faster than most people expected. Momenta’s plans for Dubai and Europe suggest the competitive field is only getting busier.
What this means for cities and investors
For cities, Zagreb is now the case study. Every mayor in Europe who has wondered whether robotaxis could work on their streets will be watching this fleet — the incident record, the public acceptance, the traffic data. The 4.7-star rating from several thousand rides is the number that will get quoted in council meetings.
For investors, the milestones-to-investment structure of the Uber deal is the thing to watch. Uber isn’t buying in on faith; it’s buying in once Verne hits its marks. That tells you where the smart money thinks the risk sits — and how fast it thinks that risk shrinks.
And for the rest of us? A date to remember: September 10, 2026. The day the driver’s seat in Europe went empty for good.
