Uber has begun offering autonomous rides in Europe for the first time, in the Croatian capital, Zagreb. From Wednesday, riders there can book a self-driving car through the Uber app, the company said. The service is run with the Chinese firm Pony.ai and the European operator Verne.

There is a caveat. The cars are not yet driverless. A licensed safety operator sits behind the wheel to monitor each ride, the companies said. That is part of a phased rollout meant to reach fully driverless operation later. For now, the service covers key areas of Zagreb, including the city centre, with wider coverage promised over time.

The launch splits the work three ways. Pony.ai supplies the autonomous-driving technology, its Gen-7 robotaxi system. Verne owns the fleet and runs the service on the ground. Uber puts the rides in its app and handles the rider experience. It builds on a partnership the three announced in March, moving it from testing to a live service.

Zagreb goes first

Zagreb is the first market under the deal. The companies said they plan to scale it to other European cities, with the next locations named later this year. The city already had a head start. Verne launched what it calls Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service there in April. It says it has since completed thousands of rides, running every day.

That figure is Verne’s own, and the companies did not break it down. Nor did they say how large the Zagreb fleet is, or when the safety operator might come out from behind the wheel. The release framed all of that as gradual, tied to meeting local rules and Uber’s safety checks. What is new today is the channel: the same cars, now bookable through an app most riders already have.

Now on the Uber app

Those rides are now available through Uber as well. Annie Duvnjak, Uber’s global head of autonomous mobility operations, called it a first step. The company wants “to bring AVs to millions of riders and build the world’s largest platform for AV deployment,” she said.

The line fits a strategy Uber has pushed since it sold its own self-driving unit years ago. Rather than build the cars, it now wants to be the app that every robotaxi operator plugs into, taking a cut of each ride. It has signed a string of such deals, including with Waymo in the United States, and has framed itself as the neutral marketplace for autonomous rides.

Marko Pejkovic, Verne’s chief executive, cast the move as a milestone for Croatia as well as the company. A service pioneered in Zagreb was now on the world’s largest mobility platform, he said. The daily experience there would help Verne reach other European cities.

Verne is the local piece of the puzzle. Named after the novelist Jules Verne, it has worked since 2019 on running autonomous ride-hailing in city traffic, handling operations, integration and the regulatory side. Its April launch in Zagreb gave the partners a working service to fold into Uber, rather than starting from scratch.

Pony.ai’s European push

For Pony.ai, the launch is a step into Europe for technology it has mostly deployed at home in China. The company is listed in New York and Hong Kong, and was founded in 2016. It calls its system a vehicle-agnostic “Virtual Driver,” and has operations across China, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

James Peng, Pony.ai’s founder and chief executive, described the arrangement as its joint deployment model in action. It pairs the firm’s robotaxi technology with Verne’s local operations and Uber’s reach. He said the aim was to create “a viable path for scaling autonomous mobility,” and to progress towards fully driverless operations.

The three-way structure is a common way to bring self-driving cars to new markets. A technology developer provides the software and hardware. A local partner runs and maintains the fleet, and a ride-hailing app supplies the customers. It lets each company do what it already does, rather than build the whole stack alone.

A crowded European race

Uber is not alone in chasing autonomous rides in Europe. WeRide, another Chinese firm, has said it will bring a robotaxi service to Denmark. The startup Bliq has won approval to run driverless cars in Finland. The region’s rules are still taking shape, and differ from those in the United States, where regulators are weighing whether to allow cars with no steering wheel at all.

Europe’s approach has generally kept a human in the loop for longer, which fits the safety-operator model on show in Zagreb. Uber said all autonomous vehicles must meet local regulatory requirements and its own safety standards before running on the app, and that the service would grow gradually.

The company was also careful to frame AVs as an addition rather than a replacement. It expects self-driving cars and human drivers to coexist for the foreseeable future, it said, with many trips still needing a person at the wheel.

For riders, the mechanics are simple. Someone opening the Uber app in Zagreb requests an UberX or Comfort trip as normal. When an autonomous car is available, the app shows details of the vehicle and how to start and finish the ride. There is no separate app to download, and the price sits in the usual Uber flow. Whether the model scales, and how quickly the safety operator can be removed, will decide how much the Zagreb launch matters beyond a single city.

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