Europe's largest robotaxi plan was signed by two companies that will not own a single car — Pony.ai and Uber add 2,000 vehicles, and a Rimac spin-off carries the permits

Pony.ai and Uber announced on 14 August 2026 that they will expand their partnership to more than 2,000 Pony.ai robotaxis across Europe, adding four European cities to the service already running in Zagreb, and covering the Middle East in the same agreement. Target cities and timetables, the companies said, will be announced in phases. The vehicles are Pony.ai's seventh-generation robotaxis, the same kit that entered commercial service in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen in November 2025 and that already carries paying passengers in Croatia. Pony.ai's founder and chief executive James Peng framed the deal as combining his company's autonomous driving technology and operational experience with Uber's global mobility platform; Sarfraz Maredia, who runs autonomous mobility at Uber, described the goal as moving "from individual launches to repeatable commercial scale". The most instructive part of the announcement is the division of labour, because it is not the usual one. Pony.ai supplies the driving system. Uber supplies the demand, through its app. And Verne — a Croatian company founded by Mate Rimac and spun out of the Rimac Group, with Marko Pejković as chief executive — owns the fleet, runs it on the ground, and leads the regulatory approval process in every launch city. In other words, the two large partners in the biggest robotaxi commitment yet made in Europe will not buy the cars and will not sit across the table from the regulators. That structure is a direct answer to what makes Europe hard. There is no single European authorisation for driverless passenger service; each country grants it separately, on its own terms. A company that wants five cities in Europe needs to run that process up to five times, in five legal systems, and it helps considerably to be a local operator while doing so. Verne says it is in talks with eleven cities in Europe, the United Kingdom and the Middle East, with more than thirty further cities under evaluation. Scale deserves a caveat that the press release does not offer. The Zagreb service, which opened in 2026 as the first commercial robotaxi operation in Europe, began with a fleet reported at ten electric SUVs — Arcfox Alpha T5 vehicles from the Chinese group BAIC — with trained safety operators on board during the early phase, rides priced at just under two euros, daily operation from 07:00 to 21:00, and a service area of roughly 90 square kilometres covering the wider centre of Zagreb and the airport. The step from that to two thousand cars is a factor of two hundred, and it is announced rather than delivered. There is also a contrast worth stating plainly. In the same month that the United States closed its door to new Chinese robots and vehicles seeking fresh equipment authorisation, a Chinese autonomous driving company set out a four-city expansion in Europe — arriving not as an importer, but as the technology supplier to a European fleet owner holding European licences. The regulatory question in Europe is not whether the software comes from China. It is who is legally answerable for the vehicle on the street, and in this deal the answer is a company from Zagreb.