Pony.ai and Verne have begun carrying passengers in fully driverless robotaxis on public roads in Zagreb, Croatia — the first such trials in Europe without a safety driver on board. The pilot runs along a 22km corridor connecting Verne's headquarters, a central business district and Franjo Tuđman Airport, with plans to extend driverless coverage across the whole operating area over the coming months.
The move follows the April launch of a commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb under a three-way arrangement in which Pony.ai supplies the autonomous driving stack, Verne handles operations, and Uber provides platform access. In its first phase with a safety driver present, the fleet accumulated over 200,000km, several thousand paid rides, and a 4.7/5 average passenger rating.
Technically, the vehicles are Pony.ai's seventh-generation robotaxi platform, built around an in-house L4 domain controller on Nvidia's Drive AGX hardware and the safety-certified DriveOS. The design includes 360-degree sensing with redundant, fail-operational systems, an architecture the company says has already been proven in driverless commercial service across four Chinese cities in mixed traffic and poor weather. Pony.ai reports over 100 million km of autonomous driving globally, of which more than 40 million km were fully driverless.
The Zagreb deployment operates under Croatian regulatory approval for passenger-carrying AV testing. It sits within Pony.ai's wider international push, which includes an Uber-linked plan for over 2,000 vehicles across Europe and a stated target of more than 3,500 robotaxis globally, across over 20 cities, by the end of 2026.
Source: ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle International — read the original article