Pony.ai and Uber will deploy more than 2,000 robotaxis across five European cities
Announced 14 August: an expanded partnership taking Pony.ai's Toyota-built robotaxis from existing operations in Zagreb to four more European cities, with Zagreb folding into the Uber app. The two companies also plan to deepen cooperation in the Middle East.
Two thousand vehicles across five cities is a deployment, not a pilot, and the choice of Europe is the strategic content. It is the market where Waymo has the least presence and where regulatory approval is city-by-city rather than national — which favours whoever can run many small negotiations at once.
The structure divides the problem sensibly. Pony.ai supplies autonomy on Toyota-built vehicles; Uber supplies demand, dispatch and the customer relationship. Neither has to solve the other's problem, and Uber has committed over $10bn to an aggregator strategy targeting 15 cities by late 2026 and 28 by 2028.
Starting from Zagreb rather than a capital is a tell about method: prove the operation somewhere the stakes are contained, then fold it into the main app once it works. That is a deliberately unglamorous sequence and it is how the deployments that survive tend to be built.
The competitive frame is now genuinely global — Waymo has plans in Tokyo, Baidu Apollo Go and WeRide are testing toward Europe. What was a two-city American question three years ago is a multi-continent one, and the entrants with the lowest per-vehicle cost are the ones expanding fastest.
CNBC — Uber partners with China's Pony.ai for 2,000 robotaxis in Europe → · Daily Kanban — Friday Morning Auto News, Aug 14, 2026: Pony.ai, Uber deploy 2K Toyota-built robotaxis across EU → · BigGo Finance — Pony AI and Uber Expand Alliance in Europe, Targeting Deployment of Over 2,000 Robotaxis →