Uber and the Chinese self-driving company Pony.ai announced on Friday that they plan to put more than 2,000 robotaxis into Europe. The vehicles go into four cities beyond Zagreb, where the pair already run what they call Europe's first commercial robotaxi service alongside the Croatian mobility company Verne. They did not name the four cities and did not give a timeline, saying only that details would be announced in phases. The expanded deal also covers plans to deploy in the Middle East.
The division of labour is the substance of the announcement. Pony.ai supplies its Level 4 autonomous driving technology, the tier at which the car drives itself without a person ready to take over, plus the rider-experience and operational expertise it has built across earlier deployments. Uber supplies the customer side: booking, payment and customer service through its platform, alongside its growing network of human drivers. Day-to-day fleet work, meaning maintenance, cleaning and charging, may be carried out by established local fleet partners chosen for each market, and vehicle funding and ownership can sit with different partners depending on the market.
Why the fleet number matters
Scale decides who survives in robotaxis. A larger fleet gathers more data, which demonstrates safety to regulators and lifts operational efficiency, and wider availability pulls in more riders. For comparison, Waymo runs a fleet of around 5,000 vehicles, primarily in the United States, and is testing rides in London. Chinese rivals Baidu Apollo Go and WeRide are ramping up their own European plans and tests, and WeRide and Uber said in June that they would launch Spain's first robotaxi pilot in Madrid later this year.
Uber is collecting partners
Uber has partnered with more than 30 autonomous vehicle companies over the past several years. Chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi has said the goal is to become the world's leading commercialisation platform for autonomous vehicles, partly by gathering a super set of data it can share with partners to speed up development. The Pony.ai relationship dates to May 2025, when the two first announced plans to bring Pony.ai robotaxis onto the Uber platform in international markets, and the Zagreb service followed this year. On Thursday Uber's Japanese subsidiary signed an agreement with a local taxi operator to manage daily fleet operations for a robotaxi test deployment in Tokyo later this year.
Pony.ai says it already runs paid, fully driverless services in China's four tier-one cities, and that it has reached break-even unit economics in several of them.
