Verne went driverless in Zagreb ten days after its EU project ended
Europe's first empty driver's seat is in Zagreb, not Munich or London
Verne and Pony.ai began carrying invited passengers with nobody at the wheel in Zagreb on 10 September, the first fully driverless rides on public roads anywhere in Europe. The cars are Chinese, the software is Chinese and the booking runs through Uber. The Croatian robotaxi that Verne was funded to build, and had produced 60 of by the summer, is not the one doing the driving.
Verne's 22 km driverless route links its headquarters to Franjo Tuđman Airport
Verne's driverless rides run on a fixed 22 km route between its Zagreb headquarters, the city's main business district and Franjo Tuđman Airport. Pony.ai's seventh-generation system steers, brakes and accelerates; Verne monitors each car remotely, and riders book through the Uber app. The service itself has been live since 8 April with an operator on board, and the fleet has covered more than 200,000 km, completed several thousand paid rides and averages a 4.7 out of 5 rating. The driverless zone is to spread across the whole Zagreb operating area within months. There is no date yet for the public to ride without an operator.
Waymo's Munich date is late 2027, and Wayve's London Mach-Es still carry a driver
Zagreb has done what Europe's larger robotaxi projects are still promising. Waymo picked Munich for its first European service and is targeting a commercial launch at the end of 2027. Uber and Wayve started London rides on 3 September with a licensed private-hire driver in every Ford Mustang Mach-E. WeRide and Uber are aiming to remove the driver in Zurich around the middle of 2027. A 22 km test loop with invited passengers is a smaller claim than any of those, but the front seat is empty now, not in two years.
The car is a BAIC Arcfox Alpha T5 and the software is Pony.ai's, not Verne's
Verne's robotaxi is not the vehicle it spent three years designing. It unveiled a two-seat pod with no steering wheel, no pedals and a 43-inch screen in June 2024, on Mobileye's Drive system, and said 100 would be working in Zagreb by the end of that year. What launched in April instead was BAIC's Arcfox Alpha T5, an electric crossover with the front passenger seat removed for luggage, running Pony.ai's stack. Pony.ai already runs driverless commercial services in four Chinese cities, has logged more than 100 million autonomous kilometres, 40 million of them with no driver, and plans more than 2,000 cars across five European cities with Uber.
The €179.5 million grant project ended on 31 August with €8.77 million of costs approved
Project 3 Mobility, Verne's original name, was awarded €179.5 million from Croatia's National Recovery and Resilience Plan, 70 percent of eligible costs, with €89.7 million paid in advance in July 2023. The contracted result was a Level 5 vehicle, one that needs no driver and no defined zone, which no company in the world has built. The deadline moved from 31 March to 31 August 2026, and the project closed on that date with €8.77 million of the advance justified. Verne says the 60 verification prototypes, their testing and the adoption of Croatia's autonomous-driving rules have been signed off, and that it is prepared to repay the full advance if the audit by SAFU, the state financing agency, finds the rest unmet. Alongside the grant it has raised more than €140 million privately, from Kia, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Rimac Group.
Croatia wrote its autonomous-driving rules as a grant deliverable, and it took a small country to use them
The regulation that lets Verne run without an operator was itself one of the project's contracted outputs. Germany has had a Level 4 law since 2021 and Waymo is still negotiating approvals at city, state and federal level. Croatia, with a population of 3.9 million and one operator to regulate, wrote its rules and then let the operator use them. The pod the grant paid for did not get Europe there first; the rulebook it paid for did.
AutoNext Take
Verne has proved that a Chinese robotaxi works in Zagreb. It has not yet proved that a Croatian one does, and the Croatian one is what the taxpayer bought. Sixty finished pods in a Zagreb facility while an Arcfox carries the passengers is the least flattering picture in European autonomy this year, and also the correct commercial decision: Pony.ai's 40 million driverless kilometres exist, Verne's do not, and a start-up with an audit pending cannot spend two more years validating its own stack.
Verne files its final report by the end of September and SAFU rules on the €89.7 million after that. If the 60 prototypes are accepted as delivered and the money stays, Croatia will have bought Europe's first empty driver's seat for the price of a car it never used. If Verne's own pod has still not carried a paying passenger by the time Waymo goes driverless in Munich at the end of 2027, it will not carry one at all, and Verne will be what Uber already treats it as: the fleet owner, not the carmaker.
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