Europe's first fully driverless robotaxi rides are being carried out in Zagreb. Pony.ai and the Croatian operator Verne announced on 10 September 2026 that they had begun driverless test rides with passengers on public roads — no safety operator in the car, and nobody in the driver's seat.
What is new, and what is not
Croatia has had a robotaxi service since April 2026, when Pony.ai, Verne and Uber launched what was billed as Europe's first commercial robotaxi operation in Zagreb. That service ran with an autonomous-vehicle operator sitting in the car.
Removing that person is the whole story. The step from a supervised vehicle to an empty driver's seat is the one every autonomy programme finds hardest, because it is the point at which the company, not a human, is answerable for what the car does next.
| April 2026 | September 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Service | Commercial, via Uber | Test rides, invited passengers |
| Driver's seat | AV operator on board | Empty |
| Route | Zagreb city service | 22 km, Verne HQ and business district to Franjo Tuđman Airport |
So this is not yet driverless service for the paying public. It is driverless test rides with invited passengers, conducted under Croatian regulations and approvals, on a fixed 22 km route that the companies say will expand over the coming months.
The hardware
The cars use Pony.ai's seventh-generation Level 4 system, built on NVIDIA's DRIVE AGX platform with a safety-certified operating system, 360-degree sensor coverage and redundant systems. Verne — part of Rimac Group, the Croatian company better known for hypercars and for supplying EV powertrains — runs the service and manages the local deployment, while Uber handles the riders.
Pony.ai says its overseas pipeline now exceeds 4,000 robotaxis, including more than 2,000 vehicles with Uber across Europe, against a global target of 3,500-plus robotaxis in over 20 cities by the end of 2026.
Why this matters to a Tesla owner
Because of who it beat, and by how much.
Waymo has named Munich as its first EU robotaxi city, with driverless service targeted for the end of 2027. A Chinese autonomy stack in a Croatian operator's cars has got there first, by more than a year, in a market nobody was watching. WeRide's Slovakian demonstration in August was a closed circuit with a safety driver. This is public roads with an empty seat.
Tesla is not in this race in Europe yet, and the reason is regulatory rather than technical. FSD (Supervised) is approved in six European markets, Slovenia being the most recent, and supervised is the operative word — European Teslas still run v14.2.2.6 with a driver responsible at all times. Musk has said the Cybercab is coming to Europe without saying when.
The useful conclusion is about the route, not the pace. Croatia shows that a European member state can authorise genuinely driverless passenger operation now, under existing national approvals, without waiting for an EU-wide framework. That is the path Tesla will have to take too — country by country, with a regulator that has to be persuaded one approval at a time.