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What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
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.
Pony.ai Robotaxi (Gen-7) →Uber puts $10bn behind 120,000 robotaxis it will not build - and buys its way into the companies that do
Alongside its second-quarter results in the first week of August 2026, Uber said it would commit more than 10 billion dollars to putting 120,000 autonomous vehicles on its platform. The money splits roughly two ways: about 7.5 billion dollars to buy fleets, released against deployment milestones rather than up front, and about 2.5 billion dollars in equity stakes in the companies that make the cars and the driving software - Lucid, Rivian, Nuro and Wayve among them. The service target is at least 15 cities by the end of 2026 and 28 cities by 2028. What is notable is the shape of the bet rather than its size. Uber has spent years insisting it does not need to build a self-driving car, having sold its own programme in 2020, and this announcement doubles down on that: more than thirty partnerships, no in-house vehicle, and capital used to secure supply rather than technology. The company is buying the two things a robotaxi operator cannot generate on its own - hardware it does not manufacture and priority access to it - while keeping the part it already owns, which is the demand. The underlying quarter was strong enough to pay for it: 208 million monthly active platform consumers, up 16 percent, trips up 18 percent, gross bookings up 22 percent to 58.02 billion dollars and revenue up 11 percent to 14.19 billion. The market response was cooler - the stock has fallen through 2026 - which reads less as doubt about the results than about how much of the value in a driverless network eventually accrues to the app rather than to whoever owns the cars. The number to keep in view is the one Uber gave earlier this month: robotaxis are live in seven cities and still account for well under half a percent of its trips. Going from that to 120,000 vehicles is not an incremental step, and the commitment is deliberately staged so the money follows the deployments rather than leading them.
Tesla says 380,000 unsupervised robotaxi miles and zero notable incidents — but still will not say how many cars
On its Q2 2026 earnings call on 5 August 2026, Tesla gave the most specific account so far of its driverless ride-hailing service. AI chief Ashok Elluswamy said the company had driven "more than 380,000 miles of unsupervised robotaxi now across six cities" and had "zero notable incidents". Elon Musk said miles driven are growing more than 10% a week. The six unsupervised cities sit in two states: Austin, Dallas and Houston in Texas, with Miami, Orlando and Tampa added in July 2026. Tesla counts a seventh U.S. market. Two things the call did not settle. First, the fleet size: CFO Vaibhav Taneja declined to give a vehicle count, arguing that robotaxis drive almost continuously, so miles rather than units are the meaningful measure. That is defensible, but it also means the mileage figure cannot be checked against how many cars are actually deployed — and the safety claim is Tesla's own, with no independent audit behind it. Second, what the seventh market is. Tesla's Bay Area operation runs under a California charter-party carrier permit — a limousine licence — with a human driver in the seat. The California Public Utilities Commission has stated the company is not operating an autonomous vehicle service there, and Tesla holds no CPUC driverless deployment permit. A Nevada application for Clark County covering up to 5,000 vehicles was filed on 5 June 2026 and remains pending. On hardware, Musk confirmed Cybercab — the two-seat car with no steering wheel or pedals — has started production at Gigafactory Texas, where Tesla lists annual capacity above 125,000 units. Production cars began engineering test drives on public roads during the quarter and employees started taking Cybercab rides on the factory campus in July. The paying service, however, still runs on Model Y. Software is FSD v14, with v15 in development; Elluswamy said the same v15 models that power Model Y will also run on Cybercab. Cars use Tesla's AI4 computer, with AI5 expected in volume production around the middle of 2027.
Tesla Robotaxi →Robotaxis need garages: Moove raises 250 million dollars to build robot depots for autonomous fleets
Moove announced on 5 August 2026 that it has raised 250 million dollars in a Series C round at a valuation of 2.1 billion dollars. Mubadala Investment Company led the round, co-led by Woven Capital — Toyota's growth fund — and Ion Pacific. The investor list also includes BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton, BlueCrest, Sona Capital, Left Lane, Square Associates, The Latest Ventures, the Ontario Power Generation Pension Plan and Uber, whose largest global fleet partner Moove is. The money is not going into vehicles or into self-driving software. It is going into what Moove calls Nests: robotics-first depots where autonomous fleets are charged, serviced, maintained and dispatched so they can keep running around the clock. Autonomous operations are already live in Phoenix and Miami, and London is named as the first international expansion. Moove runs a fleet of roughly 42,000 vehicles with about 3,300 employees and reports 420 million dollars of annualised recurring revenue; the autonomous unit alone is set to grow from about 150 to about 500 people by the end of 2026. That is the part worth noticing. Public attention in autonomous driving goes to the driving — to the models, the disengagement rates, the permits. A driverless fleet still has to be cleaned, charged, repaired and put back on the road, and with no driver on board nobody does any of it incidentally. Co-chief executive Ladi Delano puts it plainly: "Every major technology revolution becomes an infrastructure race... Autonomy requires fleets, charging, maintenance, data systems and 24/7 operations in every city." On that reading a robotaxi city is not won by whoever has the best driving model, but by whoever can service several thousand vehicles a night.