Europe's first robotaxi rides with nobody in the driver's seat — in Zagreb, not London

Pony.ai and Verne began fully driverless robotaxi rides carrying passengers on public roads in Zagreb on 10 September 2026 — the first time a European robotaxi programme has removed the human safety operator from the vehicle. The route runs 22 km from Verne's headquarters and a central business district to Franjo Tuđman Airport, with the driverless area to widen over the coming months. These are test rides sitting on top of the commercial service Pony.ai, Verne and Uber launched in Zagreb in April 2026, which carries safety operators. Pony.ai's overseas deployment pipeline now exceeds 4,000 robotaxis, including more than 2,000 planned with Uber across Europe. The tracker records the driverless rides.

Why it matters

Seven days ago Uber and Wayve put London's first robotaxis on the road with a licensed driver legally responsible in every car, because Britain has no legal category for a vehicle with nobody accountable inside it. Croatia now has passengers riding with the seat empty. The order is worth sitting with: the first European city to take the human out is not the one with the largest AV programme, the deepest capital or the most coverage — it is the one whose regulator got to the question first.

That is the pattern this newsroom keeps finding, and it has now produced three different answers in three jurisdictions in eight days. Nevada capped Tesla at ten vehicles with a supervisor requirement; Texas let Tesla self-certify a car with no steering wheel and audited afterwards; Britain licensed the cars as private hire and kept a human liable; Croatia authorised removal of the operator on a defined route. None of these tracks the maturity of the technology. All of them track how quickly a regulator was willing to write down what it would allow.

The honest limits: these are test rides, not a driverless commercial service, on one 22 km corridor, and the paid service in the same city still carries operators. Zagreb has not leapfrogged San Francisco. What it has done is be first in Europe to let a robotaxi drive with an empty seat and a passenger in it, which is the step every European programme is queued behind.

What to watch

Whether the driverless area widens as promised, whether Croatia authorises paid driverless rides, and whether the UK or Germany grants a no-operator approval before Pony.ai's 2,000-vehicle European plan needs one.