Uber and Chinese self-driving company Pony.ai are scaling their robotaxi partnership from one Croatian city to more than 2,000 vehicles across Europe and the Middle East.
Uber and Pony.ai announced on August 14, 2026 that they're expanding their robotaxi partnership to deploy more than 2,000 autonomous vehicles across Europe, growing out from the single city where the service currently runs. Pony.ai will supply the Level 4 self-driving technology. Uber will run the ride-hailing app and handle fleet operations. Neither company named the four new cities, and neither gave a firm timeline. They said the details would come in phases.
The starting point is Zagreb, Croatia, where the two companies launched Europe's first commercial robotaxi service in March 2026, working with local operator Verne to own and run the fleet. That service will now anchor a rollout to four additional European cities, and separately, into the Middle East. Pony.ai founder and CEO James Peng called it "an important new phase in the partnership between Pony AI and Uber," language that undersells what's actually happening here: a Guangzhou-based company just became the supplier behind a five-city robotaxi buildout on a continent that, until recently, wasn't supposed to be China's market to win.
The vehicles doing the driving are Pony.ai's seventh-generation robotaxis, the same model the company put into commercial service in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen back in November 2025. Uber and Pony.ai first struck their global partnership in May 2025. Zagreb was the proof of concept. This week's announcement is the scale-up.
Uber isn't relying on one autonomous driving partner anywhere. According to TechCrunch's ongoing tracker of Uber's autonomous vehicle deals, the company has now lined up more than 30 partners globally, including Waymo in Austin and Atlanta, WeRide in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Riyadh, Avride in Dallas, Nuro powering a Lucid-based premium service, and Momenta testing in Munich. Pony.ai's Zagreb deployment was just one entry on that list. Now it's the biggest.
That matters because the Uber-Waymo relationship, long treated as the flagship of the robotaxi era, has been fraying. TechCrunch reported in June 2026 that Uber and Waymo quietly parted ways in Phoenix, and Waymo has told Uber it plans to launch its own standalone app in Austin and Atlanta starting January 2028, cutting Uber out of those markets entirely. Waymo can afford to walk away from Uber in the U.S. because it owns the customer relationship there. In Europe, Waymo has no such foothold. Pony.ai does, and it got there first.
WeRide, another Chinese firm, is expanding into Europe too, with planned service in Madrid and Zurich. So Pony.ai isn't alone. But nobody else is close to this scale: 2,000-plus vehicles across five cities plus the Middle East. For now, Pony.ai leads the pack.
The awkward timing #
The deal lands just as European governments are getting nervous about Chinese technology under the hood of connected vehicles. Poland is weighing restrictions on Chinese-made cars near military bases, following a similar move by the UK, according to reporting from Carscoops. Cameras, radar, constant connectivity: the European Council on Foreign Relations has warned that Chinese EVs functioning as rolling sensor platforms pose a genuine data security question the EU hasn't yet written rules to address. There's no blanket EU law banning Chinese automotive or AV companies. But the political mood is shifting, and a Chinese company operating thousands of camera-and-sensor-loaded robotaxis on European streets is a different proposition than one selling cars through a dealership.
Uber isn't waiting around for that debate to resolve. Neither is Pony.ai, which is set to report earnings on August 18, just four days after this announcement, with investors watching to see whether Zagreb's early traction translates into real revenue. PONY shares traded slightly lower in premarket trading Friday, a muted reaction for a deal this size, according to Benzinga.
Frankly, the more interesting story here isn't the robotaxi count. It's who supplies the brains behind it. Europe spent the last two years arguing about whether to let Chinese EVs and chips into its economy. While that fight played out in headlines, a Chinese autonomous driving company quietly became the backbone of its first commercial robotaxi network. Nobody voted on that. It just happened, one Uber press release at a time.
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