Robotaxi Report #3: Europe goes robotaxi

This newsletter couldn’t happen without our long-time partner Voltera. Here’s a quick intro in Voltera’s own words:

“Voltera develops and operates charging infrastructure engineered for autonomous mobility.

Our sites deliver reliable high-power charging in key geofenced zones, helping robotaxi fleets maximize uptime and scale from pilot programs to full commercial deployment.”

Important: this newsletter does not go through any editorial overview of Voltera’s team, nor can they influence any of the reporting — the words in this newsletter are to be blamed on me alone.

This Wednesday, Europe reached a huge milestone. The very first actually public robotaxi service started.

📍 Zagreb, Croatia

Verne robotaxi service launched for the public in Zagreb with 9 robotaxis, offering the first-ever paid rides in Europe. Here’s our deep dive article link, as we became the first to report and did so most extensively to date, I might add.

For the users who have been accepted from the waitlist and can now download the Verne app, there are 9 robotaxis ready to serve across key districts of the Croatian capital, with plans to expand coverage across the city.

This screenshot, on the Verne website, gives an idea what the service area actually looks like:

The rides will be provided in the Pony.ai-powered Arcfox Alpha T5 electric vehicles, based on the recent Verne & Pony.ai & Uber partnership (link). The bespoke two-seater Verne robotaxis are still the end goal, we’ve been told.

Details of the service today:

“For the first time in Europe, there is a real commercial robotaxi service. People can use it and take real autonomous rides.” — Marko Pejković, Co-Founder and CEO of Verne.

This is what the Verne app looks like up close:

Verne also shared the first-ever commercial robotaxi ride in Europe in a 20-minute video. The ride is taken on the 30th of March by the co-founder & CEO, Marko Pejković, in the Arcfox Alpha T5 robotaxi from their fresh partnership with Pony AI.

You can find the video and everything we noticed from our article, but here are a few interesting bits. For example,

The doors will be locked when it arrives, which you can then unlock from the app:

There’s also an interesting addition that comes from the vehicle’s outbound speakers. In Croatian, it says out loud:

“[inaudible, likely about waiting a customer]”

“When they arrive, we leave immediately.”

“If this is your vehicle, unlock it with the VERNE app”

Inside the vehicle, the rear screen shows Verne-branded info, welcoming to the vehicle, a way to choose between Hrvatski (Croatian) and English, and a button to call support. A Verne cat is asking to ‘please start the ride as soon as possible’.

Marko explains that the vehicle isn’t connected to Google per se, it can drive on its own, and can drive without a connection to the internet. The sensor suite includes LiDAR, radar, cameras, and the service also uses HD maps.

When the AV operators are removed (shoutout to Dario on the video), the vehicles are able to call upon the remote operator when not sure what to do, and the remote operator can toggle the correct action for the vehicle (eg, “yes, you can pass”).

This is standard operation for most providers; for example, Waymo says this is how it works for their service, with no ability for remote operators to take over the vehicle, but just “telling” it what the right action is.

At the same time, on the Tesla side, they’ve recently confirmed they are also able to overtake the vehicle and teleoperate the vehicle at low speeds.

Marko also confirms that the remote operator can not take over remotely.

You can see the sensor suite on top of the vehicle says “ROBO TAXI”, and below it says “hvala na strpljenju”, which means “thank you for your patience.”

They also touch a bit on the bespoke Verne robotaxi topic:

One of the things they mention in this (surprisingly transparent) video is that, for example, you cannot open the door on the left of the robotaxi yet (for safety reasons by default) — “I don’t think it’s fixed yet, so you’ll have to come out from the other side”.

Now that Verne has completed this first step of the service, they can start adding layers on top of it, like specific partnerships with hotels, upgraded vehicles (like removing the front passenger seat for more space & additional screen) and other ideas mentioned in the video.

A neat little addition is that when finishing the ride, the vehicle shows the Right Camera view to give an extra layer of safety when going out of the car:

… and that’s it for the very first commercial robotaxi service in Europe. We wish the team a safe ramp-up in Croatia and in the countries they’ll (undoubtedly soon) expand to.

Our speculation: This is also when we expect Uber to be looped in — I would assume an Uber investment in Verne will be announced shortly (no details other than ‘intention’ mentioned in their partnership PR, and I do not have any inside info, but it was likely tied to operational milestones like this one).

If you want to share this deep dive on Verne robotaxi launch as our article, it lives separately on EVwire here: (link)

Tesla has finally made solid progress in bringing its Full-Self Driving (Supervised) driver’s assistance system to European Tesla owners:

Just yesterday, the Dutch regulator RDW issued a type approval for Tesla Full Self-Driving (Supervised) in the Netherlands and concluded the system is safer than other driver assistance systems. (link)

Tesla says the rollout in the Netherlands begins shortly, and it’s also confirmed by some owners already.

Here’s a part of the RDW statement (bold emphasis ours):

"Due to the continuous strict monitoring of the driver in the vehicle, the system is safer than other driver assistance systems. We have thoroughly researched and checked this system, more than a year and a half.

Safety is paramount for the RDW. The proper use of this driver's system makes a positive contribution to road safety."

Approval in the Netherlands paves the way for the rest of Europe, as RDW says these next steps will happen now:

However, it is my understanding, that countries can also take this Dutch type approval and already frontrun the EU-wide approval themselves with necessary steps.

European Tesla owners are also in somewhat of a unique position — while the FSD (Supervised) has been developed right under the eyes and hands of US Tesla owners with gradual software rollouts, the owners in Europe go from Autopilot, which is an old technological stack which bares no resemblance for current FSD capabilities, to a V14.3 FSD (Supervised).

The latter should, in theory and at least in the case of a lot of instances we have seen, allow for interventionless drives across thousands of kilometers. Importantly, however, it does need to be supervised.

The rollout to Tesla owners in the Netherlands is imminent, as the FSD (Supervised) subscription (previously only available as an outright €7500 price) just officially launched €99/month.

Tesla, most likely to abide by regulations, will require all owners in the Netherlands who activate FSD (Supervised) for the first time to complete a short quiz (4-minute video here), ensuring they understand how it works.

I personally went for a ride-along of FSD (S) in Malaga, Spain, a month ago and can confirm that the FSD (which was even an earlier version) handled the European context very well.

With approval in the Netherlands, Tesla FSD (S) is available in the US, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, South Korea, China, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands.

We’ve also already seen how Tesla handles the border crossings for FSD service now, as it is only allowed within Dutch borders — a notification on the vehicle screen (which the owner saw on a car ten hours before the RDW announcement came btw, frontrunning the news a bit) shows you that there’s an “Upcoming country border” in navigation, and that the FSD (S) will become unavailable:

While the FSD (Supervised) is not a fully self-driving feature and needs supervision from the driver (!), it is living on the same hardware and software stack as the robotaxis Tesla runs in Austin right now, as Unsupervised, meaning with no people in the vehicle other than the passenger (aka true robotaxi).

The only hardware difference we’ve seen between the Model Ys in the Robotaxi service and regular Model Ys is a rear camera washer, which regular Model Ys don’t have.

This, the existence of the rear camera washer, has actually been helpful in determining where Tesla is testing its robotaxi service — the Tesla community has been finding fleets (as in 60 units sitting in a lot per site and such) from a lot of markets, as Tesla plans to enter 7 more US cities in the next three months:

The Cybercab should be running on the same stack, too. Speaking of which, here’s a still from Giga Texas from the drone flyover video by Joe Tegtmeyer, on April 8th:

He says he spotted ~60 of these, all of which still seem somewhat in test versions of different configurations. Tesla is supposed to start mass production of these in April.

Anyway, back to how this Netherlands approval relates to Robotaxis: it means that Tesla, even though it will most likely need additional approvals for a robotaxi service, can now increasingly gather local training data for it with an increasingly FSD (Supervised)-enabled Tesla fleet, and can validate that its tech stack is actually ready for going driverless. It’ll also gain additional valuable safety data to present to regulators.

A quick glance at the Tesla FSD Safety page says the fleet has completed 9.17M miles (14.8M kilometers) driven on FSD (Supervised) worldwide as of today, a counter which the team keeps revising upwards with some jumps about every quarter now.

As for Tesla robotaxi plans in Europe, I have also heard some behind-the-scenes talk of a specific city in Europe that might get a live robotaxi rollout far sooner than expected. I’ll keep you posted.

But okay, enough of Europe.

Let’s dig deeper into an interesting launch in the US 👇

Nashville, Tennessee, becomes the 11th city where one can hail a Waymo robotaxi.

Here are the details:

Nashville deployment here is an interesting one, for a particular reason.

In addition to deploying the Waymo vehicles also on Lyft’s platform simultaneously (in contrast with the early Uber deals where Waymos were only on Uber app), Lyft is also acting as the full infrastructure partner for Waymo.

As you might know, Waymo is partnering with different companies depending on the markets it enters for that “next layer”, which I call the robotaxi-enabling layer.

In some markets, Waymo has announced those partners publicly (e.g. Avis, Moove), whereas in other cities the partners are left outside of public announcements, almost as if Waymo is whitelabeling their service.

PS — we have a lot of influential readers here from the robotaxi industry. If you have a good insight into Waymo’s partners in a city or across cities, please let me know. I already know about a few, but I’m putting together my own proprietary analysis to map the whole “second layer” ecosystem out!
I’ll create a shoutout in this newsletter to anyone who sends me a tip.

Okay, back to the topic — Lyft as the enabler for Waymo 👇

This actually works through Lyft’s subsidiary, Flexdrive, which Lyft acquired for $20M back in 2020. Flexdrive has been repositioning itself to become exactly that player: fleet management, maintenance, infrastructure, and depot operations for robotaxis. Here’s a decent video from Lyft itself showing a bit of the kitchen side on how their current Lyft-driver-fleet management will fit in with the robotaxi future (3-min video).

Flexdrive isn’t new to the fleet management game: it operates 15,000 vehicles across 24 U.S. locations for drivers on the Lyft platform. This existing 24-site location set might also give us ideas of the regions we might see the Waymo x Lyft partnership expands to (just my speculation).

For Nashville, Lyft is launching a purpose-built autonomous vehicle facility to support the fleet in Nashville. No doubt it will serve as the first real test for AV hubs they will launch all across the US and Europe (Lyft acquired FreeNow in Europe and will launch Baidu robotaxis… * checks the time * …any minute now).

By the way, Lyft’s Flexdrive is now hiring for the first upcoming AV depot in Nashville, as per Jeremy Bird, Lyft’s Executive VP of Global Growth, and the list is currently showing four openings (just saw five the other day): (link). Jeremy also writes that any current Lyft driver applications are fast-tracked to interviews.

To anyone from Lyft / flexdrive reading this… why yes, I would fladly fly to the US just for a tour of your new AV depot.

How does the dual-ordering from Waymo & Lyft work?

Waymo and Lyft will implement a new “dynamic marketplace integration” that enables Waymo to make its vehicles available for matching with rides on the Lyft network, and request rides on the Waymo network.

As for Lyft’s plans in the AV world in terms of partnerships, here’s what they’ve laid out in their docs as the AV value chain and where Lyft & flexdrive places. We’ll do a deeper dive on Lyft’s other partners soon:

We’ll kick off this new section to bring you the industry events scheduled within the next few months.

RIDE AI
April 15 | SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco, CA
Agenda

“Ride AI 2026 brings together the architects of the autonomy economy for an exclusive day of insights, connections, and innovation.” 9 panels, 3 firesides, keynotes, and real tech showcases.”

When visiting, tune in to “Enabling Uptime: Infrastructure and Operations for Autonomous Ridehailing” with Brett Hauser - CEO of Voltera, on the panel.

CURBIVORE
April 16 & 17 | Downtown Los Angeles
Agenda

“Experience Curbivore’s 2026 agenda – hear from the brightest minds working to reinvent the worlds of autonomy, delivery, mobility, dining, retail, civic tech, and so much more.”

When visiting, tune in to “Keep On Rolling: Electrifying, Scaling & Automating The Vehicles of Tomorrow” with John McLean - Head of Market Development, Voltera, on the panel

ATOMS
April 22 | San Francisco
Registration

Travis Kalanick (yes, the TK) launched Atoms and is hosting a “Celebrating being back” launch party.

Travis has rebranded CloudKitchens & larger robotics business into this Atoms, and they’ve been working hard in stealth for eight or so years. I do believe he chose the perfect timing for a public re-entry to this space.

Rumors have it that he also plans to acquire Pronto by the way — Anthony Levandowski's AV startup. If you know the history there… this is a fascinating move.