Pony.ai and Uber to put more than 2,000 Chinese robotaxis on European streets

Pony.ai and Uber have expanded their partnership to put more than 2,000 robotaxis on European roads, a deal that hands one of China’s autonomous-driving champions a route onto the continent’s streets through an American app and a scattering of local fleet owners.

The arrangement is divided as Pony.ai supplies the Level 4 self-driving technology and the operational know-how, Uber provides the platform, meaning booking, payments and customer service, along with its considerable market reach, and local partners own and run the actual fleets. In Zagreb, that partner is Croatia’s Verne.

Zagreb goes first, launching on the Uber platform in 2026, with four more European cities to follow in phases and a Middle East deployment also pencilled in.

It is a familiar shape for Uber, which has spent the past year signing up self-driving suppliers rather than building its own, from Wayve robotaxis in London to a growing roster of partners elsewhere.

The logic is asset-light and, for a Chinese firm eyeing Europe, quietly clever. By letting local partners shoulder the cost of the vehicles and much of the regulatory paperwork, Pony.ai sidesteps a good deal of the capital and compliance burden that has made robotaxi expansion so brutally expensive everywhere else.

It also plays to what Pony.ai already has. The company runs paid, fully driverless robotaxis in four Chinese cities and says it has reached city-wide breakeven unit economics in several markets, a claim few Western rivals can make with a straight face.

That track record is precisely what makes it useful to Uber, which would rather partner with a supplier that has already sweated the hard, expensive years of testing than start from scratch.

“By combining Pony.ai’s proven autonomous driving technology and operational know-how with Uber’s global mobility platform and extensive market reach, we aim to build sustained commercial operations at scale across Europe and beyond,” said Pony.ai chief executive Dr James Peng.

Uber and Pony.ai first joined forces in May 2025, and this fresh commitment scales that early pact up considerably. Sarfraz Maredia, who heads Uber’s autonomous mobility unit, framed Europe as the next proving ground for the tie-up.

There is a wrinkle, though, and it is a sizeable one. A Chinese self-driving system, hoovering up detailed mapping and movement data as it ferries passengers around European cities, arrives at a moment when Brussels is increasingly twitchy about Chinese technology, from electric vehicles to telecoms kit.

The data questions rather write themselves. Level 4 robotaxis are essentially rolling sensor arrays, and where all that footage and location data ends up being processed, stored and potentially accessed is precisely the sort of thing European regulators have already started asking of Chinese carmakers.

Uber, for its part, has been unusually candid about losing the self-driving race it once led. Having sold off its own autonomous unit years ago, it now positions itself as the neutral platform on which everyone else’s robots compete, and increasingly as the lobbyist writing the rulebook.

That pragmatism runs through its wider European ambitions. Uber is already testing Volkswagen’s MOIA minibuses and has run into trouble on the safety front too, with US regulators probing partner Avride after a spate of crashes in Dallas.

Whether European passengers will much care about the provenance of the car that pulls up is another matter entirely. For most riders, the deciding factors will be price, availability and, above all, whether the thing brakes in time.

What the deal makes plain is that the robotaxi race is no longer a purely American or Chinese affair played out on home turf.

Pony.ai’s arrival, via Uber’s app and a Croatian startup, is the moment the contest properly reaches the European kerb, and the moment Europe has to decide how comfortable it really is with whose software is doing the driving.