Runner-up · Autonomous mobility · Robotaxis
Zagreb’s robotaxi test removed the onboard safety driver.
Pony.ai and Verne started fully driverless passenger test rides on a 22-kilometer public-road corridor in Zagreb. The move follows more than 200,000 kilometers and several thousand rides with an onboard autonomous-vehicle operator.
Invited passengers can now ride without an onboard safety operator between Verne’s headquarters, a major Zagreb business district and Franjo Tuđman Airport. The partners say they will expand the route over coming months toward the full operating area, subject to Croatian regulations and approvals.
The seventh-generation vehicle uses a Pony.ai Level 4 domain controller on Nvidia DRIVE AGX, 360-degree sensing, redundancy and fail-operational controls. Verne’s service began in April with an onboard operator and has logged more than 200,000 kilometers, several thousand customer rides and an average 4.7/5 rating. Those figures are company-reported and the current driverless phase remains a test, not open citywide service.
Read original story ↗01
What changed
Zagreb already had a commercial robotaxi service with an onboard autonomous-vehicle operator. What changed is removal of that operator for passenger testing on public roads, converting the program from supervised commercial operation into a fully driverless regulatory and safety trial.
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Why it matters
The hardest autonomy milestone is not a demonstration but removing the human fallback while maintaining a service operation, regulatory compliance and passenger trust. Zagreb gives Europe a live test of how a technology provider, local fleet operator and ride-hailing platform can divide responsibility. The corridor and prior operating history provide more evidence than a closed pilot, while the invited-passenger format keeps the risk bounded. If safety data supports expansion, the model could reduce the capital and operating burden of entering new cities without requiring one company to own the entire stack.
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What to watch
Watch disengagements, remote-assistance events, incident reporting, route expansion and the transition from invited passengers to general availability. Regulators should also disclose the evidence thresholds used to approve a broader driverless operating area.
Why it was a runner-up
The driverless transition is tangible deployment, but it covers one invited-passenger route and relies mainly on company evidence, limiting its reach and independent confidence.
Impact: 84/100 · Confidence: 87/100
Pony.ai and Verne provide specific route, fleet, technology and operating metrics, and Nvidia publicly confirmed the DRIVE deployment. There is no equivalent independent operating dataset or regulator report yet, so confidence is high in the announced test but lower in performance and scalability claims.
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