A city better known for its Baroque architecture and café culture than for autonomous vehicles has quietly made history. Zagreb, Croatia’s capital of roughly 800,000 people, is now home to Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service, operated by a Finnish company called Verne. Not Berlin. Not Paris. Not Amsterdam. Zagreb.
The service launched on July 14, 2025, and it’s already picking up paying customers on public roads — no safety drivers behind the wheel, no test-phase caveats, no asterisks. According to The Next Web, Verne’s fleet of purpose-built autonomous vehicles began operating in a defined zone in the Croatian capital, marking the first time a robotaxi service has gone fully commercial anywhere in Europe.
That distinction matters enormously.
While Waymo has been ferrying passengers across several American cities for years, and various Chinese operators including Baidu’s Apollo Go and Pony.ai have scaled rapidly in cities like Wuhan and Beijing, Europe has remained conspicuously absent from the autonomous ride-hailing conversation. Regulatory fragmentation across the EU, cautious national transport authorities, and a general cultural skepticism toward driverless technology have kept the continent on the sidelines. Until now.
Verne was founded by Markku Korvenranta, who previously held senior roles at Nokia and other Finnish technology firms. The company chose Zagreb not on a whim but through a deliberate strategy of targeting mid-sized European cities where regulatory cooperation could be secured more quickly than in the continent’s larger, more bureaucratic capitals. Croatia’s government, eager to position itself as a technology-forward EU member state, proved receptive. The result is a regulatory framework that allowed Verne to skip the prolonged pilot-phase limbo that has stalled competitors in Germany, France, and the UK.
The vehicles themselves are worth examining. Verne doesn’t use retrofitted Teslas or modified Hyundais. The company designed its own purpose-built autonomous vehicle from the ground up, optimized specifically for urban ride-hailing. As reported by The Next Web, the cars feature a distinctive pod-like design, with large glass panels intended to maximize passenger comfort and visibility while housing an array of lidar, radar, and camera sensors. The interior is configured for passengers, not drivers — there’s no steering wheel, no pedals, no pretense of manual control.
This approach mirrors what Zoox, the Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company, has pursued in the United States, and it stands in contrast to Waymo’s strategy of building its autonomous stack on top of existing vehicle platforms from Jaguar and, more recently, Geely’s Zeekr. Verne’s bet is that purpose-built vehicles will deliver a better rider experience and more efficient sensor integration. Whether that bet pays off at scale remains to be seen, but the early signals from Zagreb are encouraging.
So why should the broader transportation industry care about a small fleet in a mid-sized Balkan city?
Because Europe’s regulatory dam may be breaking. The EU’s General Safety Regulation, which took full effect in July 2024, established a framework for automated driving systems at the type-approval level. But implementation has been left largely to member states, creating a patchwork of national rules. Croatia’s willingness to move ahead of larger EU economies sends a signal — and potentially creates competitive pressure on countries like Germany, where Mobileye and others have been conducting limited autonomous trials without achieving full commercial deployment.
Verne’s Zagreb operation also arrives at a moment of intensifying global competition. In the United States, Waymo now operates in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, with plans to expand further. The company, owned by Alphabet, recently disclosed that it’s completing over 150,000 paid trips per week. Tesla, meanwhile, launched its own robotaxi service in Austin in June 2025, though its vision-only approach — eschewing lidar entirely — continues to generate debate among engineers and safety researchers.
China’s market is scaling even faster. Baidu’s Apollo Go service operates across multiple Chinese cities, and regulatory approvals there have come with a speed that has left Western competitors envious and somewhat alarmed. Pony.ai went public on Nasdaq in late 2024 and has been expanding its commercial operations in both China and the Middle East.
Against this backdrop, Europe’s absence has been glaring. And embarrassing, frankly, for a continent that prides itself on engineering prowess and has some of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers. Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis have all invested in autonomous driving technology, but none has launched a commercial robotaxi service on European soil. The closest any major European player has come is Mobileye’s partnership with Sixt in Munich, which has conducted supervised autonomous rides but hasn’t removed the safety driver.
Verne’s move into Zagreb changes the narrative. It doesn’t change the competitive reality overnight — a handful of vehicles in one city doesn’t constitute market dominance — but it establishes a beachhead. And beachheads matter in technology races.
The company has disclosed plans to expand to additional European cities, though it hasn’t named specific targets. Industry analysts have speculated that Tallinn, Lisbon, and Helsinki are likely candidates, given their manageable size, relatively progressive regulatory environments, and existing smart-city infrastructure. Verne has also indicated interest in eventually entering larger markets, but the company’s leadership has been candid about the advantages of starting small.
“We’re building trust city by city,” Korvenranta has said in previous interviews, a philosophy that echoes Waymo’s early approach of proving the technology in Phoenix’s relatively simple suburban grid before tackling the chaos of San Francisco.
The economics of robotaxis in Europe present both opportunities and challenges distinct from those in the US and China. European cities are generally denser, with narrower streets, more complex traffic patterns involving cyclists and trams, and a population more accustomed to robust public transit. Ride-hailing services from Uber and Bolt already operate widely, but they face higher labor costs than their American counterparts, which theoretically makes the economic case for removing the driver even more compelling.
But the flip side is real too. European consumers and regulators tend to demand higher safety standards and more rigorous data privacy protections than their American or Chinese counterparts. The EU’s AI Act, which entered into force in stages starting in 2024, classifies autonomous vehicles as high-risk AI systems subject to extensive conformity assessments, transparency requirements, and human oversight obligations. Complying with these rules while operating a fully driverless service adds complexity and cost.
Verne appears to have anticipated these challenges. The company has emphasized its data handling practices, noting that its vehicles process sensor data locally and minimize the collection of personally identifiable information. It has also established a remote operations center in Zagreb where human operators can monitor vehicles in real time and intervene if necessary — a setup similar to what Waymo and Cruise have deployed in the US.
The insurance question looms large as well. In traditional ride-hailing, liability in an accident typically falls on the driver and their insurer. Remove the driver, and the liability calculus shifts dramatically toward the vehicle manufacturer and the software provider. European insurance frameworks are still adapting to this reality. The UK’s Automated Vehicles Act, passed in 2024, attempted to clarify liability by making insurers primarily responsible for accidents involving approved autonomous vehicles, with rights of recovery against manufacturers. Croatia’s framework reportedly follows a similar model, though full details haven’t been made public.
For incumbent automakers, Verne’s launch is a provocation. Not a threat to their quarterly earnings — not yet — but a reminder that the first mover in European autonomous mobility may not be a company headquartered in Stuttgart or Wolfsburg. It may be a Finnish startup operating in Croatia. The pattern isn’t unprecedented. Tesla, after all, was a California startup when it began eating into the market share of century-old automakers.
The technology itself continues to improve at a pace that makes earlier skepticism look increasingly dated. Lidar costs have dropped by roughly 90% over the past five years. Machine learning models for perception and prediction have grown dramatically more capable, benefiting from the same scaling laws that have driven advances in large language models. And the accumulated miles of real-world autonomous driving data — Waymo alone has logged tens of billions of miles in simulation and tens of millions on public roads — are creating a flywheel effect that makes each successive deployment safer and more reliable.
None of this means the road ahead is smooth. Autonomous vehicles still struggle with edge cases — unusual situations that fall outside their training data. Heavy snow, construction zones, emergency vehicles behaving unpredictably, pedestrians doing something truly unexpected. Zagreb’s continental climate, with cold winters and occasional heavy snowfall, will test Verne’s systems in ways that Phoenix’s perpetual sunshine does not.
Public acceptance is another variable. Surveys consistently show that a significant percentage of consumers remain uncomfortable with the idea of riding in a vehicle with no human driver. That discomfort tends to diminish with exposure — people who have actually ridden in a Waymo are far more likely to say they’d do it again — but building that initial trust requires time and incident-free operation. A single high-profile accident could set back public perception dramatically, as Uber discovered after a fatal crash involving one of its test vehicles in Tempe, Arizona in 2018.
Verne’s leadership appears acutely aware of these stakes. The company has opted for a conservative operational domain in Zagreb, limiting initial service to a defined geographic area with well-mapped roads and relatively predictable traffic patterns. Expansion of the service area will come gradually, based on accumulated performance data. It’s the kind of measured approach that doesn’t generate breathless headlines but tends to produce durable results.
The broader implications for European transportation policy are significant. If Verne succeeds in Zagreb and expands to other cities, it will create pressure on the European Commission and national governments to harmonize autonomous vehicle regulations more quickly. The current patchwork approach — where a vehicle approved for driverless operation in Croatia might need entirely separate approval to operate in France or Italy — is unsustainable if the technology proves commercially viable.
And it will create pressure on European automakers to accelerate their own autonomous driving programs or risk ceding yet another segment of the mobility market to newcomers. Volkswagen’s recent partnership with Mobileye, BMW’s collaboration with Intel, and Mercedes-Benz’s Level 3 system approved for use on German highways at speeds up to 95 km/h all represent steps in this direction, but none has resulted in a fully driverless commercial service.
The investment community is watching closely. Autonomous vehicle companies have raised tens of billions of dollars globally, and the sector has experienced both euphoric highs and painful corrections. Argo AI’s abrupt shutdown in 2022, after receiving billions from Ford and Volkswagen, served as a sobering reminder that capital alone doesn’t guarantee success. Verne has raised funding from European and Nordic investors, though the company has been relatively quiet about specific figures.
What isn’t quiet is the signal Zagreb sends. Europe’s first commercial robotaxi is on the road. It’s Finnish-built, Croatian-approved, and operating without a human behind the wheel. The technology works. The regulatory framework exists. The question now is whether this remains an isolated experiment or becomes the opening chapter of something much larger.
If history is any guide, the answer depends less on the technology than on the willingness of governments, insurers, and the public to adapt. The technology, at this point, is ahead of the institutions designed to govern it. Zagreb just proved that at least one European city is ready to close the gap.
WebProNews is an iEntry Publication