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 call Europe's first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb, Croatia, in late March 2026.
• The partnership will extend to the Middle East, though no cities or timelines have been named.
• Waymo, owned by Google's parent Alphabet, leads globally with roughly 5,000 vehicles.
• Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has said his company's goal is to become the world's leading platform for autonomous-vehicle rides.

A self-driving taxi, or robotaxi, carries passengers with no human driver, relying on cameras, sensors and onboard AI to navigate city streets. Uber wants a lot of them, fast.

On Friday, the company and Pony.ai, a Chinese autonomous-vehicle firm partly backed by Uber itself, announced a target of 2,000 robotaxis on European roads, with the partnership stretching into the Middle East. Four additional European cities are in scope; neither company has named them or set a date.

Why does this matter to ordinary passengers?

More driverless cars means shorter waits and, over time, lower fares. Running a robotaxi costs less than paying a driver's wage, and the vehicles collect data around the clock. That data loop is the whole point: CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said this month that Uber's strategy is to gather what he called "a super set of data" to share with its autonomous-vehicle partners and accelerate their development.

The two companies already have skin in the game. Their Zagreb service, which they claim is Europe's first commercial robotaxi operation, went live in late March 2026, as first reported by CNBC Tech. Croatia is a modest starting point, but it gives the partnership real-world mileage and a regulatory record to show other governments.

How does Uber stack up against the competition?

It's behind on its own fleet count but ahead on partnerships. Waymo leads globally with around 5,000 vehicles, mostly in U.S. Cities. The Alphabet-backed company is now testing rides in London and reportedly set up legal entities in four major EU economies in June 2025, with Tokyo plans also moving.

Chinese rivals aren't standing still either. Baidu's Apollo Go and WeRide are both pushing into Europe, and Uber sits inside several of those plans. WeRide and Uber announced in June that Madrid's first robotaxi pilot would launch later this year; the pair already run services together in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. On Thursday, Uber's Japanese subsidiary signed a deal with a local taxi operator to manage a robotaxi test deployment in Tokyo later this year.

When Waymo's scale and the sheer volume of Chinese entrants are both on the table, infrastructure may end up mattering as much as software. Our 5 August story on Moove's $250 million raise showed how one fleet operator is betting its $2.1 billion valuation on owning exactly that physical layer.

Pony.ai reports quarterly earnings on Tuesday. Those numbers should reveal something about the actual cost of stitching together a 2,000-vehicle fleet across two continents, which is the figure worth watching.