Uber and Pony.ai plan 2,000 self-driving taxis across Europe and the Middle East

Key points

• Uber and Chinese autonomous-vehicle company Pony.ai announced plans on Friday to deploy 2,000 self-driving taxis across Europe.
• The two companies launched what they claim is Europe's first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb, Croatia, in late March 2026.
• The partnership will extend to the Middle East, though specific cities and timelines have not been named.
• Waymo, the robotaxi company owned by Google's parent Alphabet, currently leads the world with a fleet of roughly 5,000 vehicles.
• Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has said his company's goal is to become the world's leading platform for selling autonomous-vehicle rides.

A self-driving taxi, or robotaxi, is a car with no human driver that uses cameras, sensors and onboard artificial intelligence to navigate city streets on its own. Uber wants a lot of them, and it wants them everywhere.

On Friday, Uber and Pony.ai, a Chinese autonomous-vehicle company partly backed by Uber itself, announced plans to put 2,000 robotaxis on European roads. The partnership will also expand into the Middle East. Neither company named the four additional European cities they are targeting, nor gave an exact launch date.

Why does this matter to ordinary passengers?

More driverless cars on the road means shorter wait times and, eventually, lower fares. Robotaxis typically cost less to run than a human-driven cab over time because there is no driver wage, and the vehicles collect data around the clock to improve their own performance.

The two companies already have a foothold. In late March 2026, Uber and Pony.ai launched a commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb, Croatia's capital, which they call the first of its kind in Europe, as first reported by CNBC Tech. Croatia is a modest starting point, but it hands the partnership real-world data and a regulatory track record to show other European governments.

Fleet size matters enormously in this business. The more cars running, the more driving data gets collected, the safer the system can prove itself to regulators, and the more useful the service becomes to riders. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said earlier this month that the company's strategy is to gather what he called "a super set of data" to share with its autonomous-vehicle partners and speed up their development.

How does Uber stack up against the competition?

Uber is behind on its own fleet but ahead on partnerships. Waymo, the robotaxi company owned by Google's parent Alphabet, leads the world with around 5,000 vehicles, mostly in U.S. cities. Waymo is now testing rides in London and reportedly created new legal entities in four major European Union countries in June 2025, with Tokyo plans also in motion.

Chinese rivals are also moving fast. Baidu's Apollo Go and WeRide are both targeting Europe, and Uber is woven into several of their plans too. Uber and WeRide announced in June that they would launch Madrid's first robotaxi pilot later this year. The pair already operate together in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

On Thursday, Uber said its Japanese arm signed a deal with a local taxi company to manage a robotaxi test deployment in Tokyo later this year.

Pony.ai is scheduled to release its quarterly earnings on Tuesday, which may shed more light on the scale and cost of these ambitions.