Pony.ai and Verne Begin Fully Driverless Passenger Robotaxi Tests in Zagreb

Pony.ai and Verne have begun passenger Robotaxi test rides in Zagreb without an onboard safety operator, moving from the earlier service with an onboard AV operator to a fully driverless testing phase.

What happened

• The test rides take place on public roads and carry passengers.
• There is no onboard safety operator in the vehicle.
• The current 22-kilometre route links Verne's headquarters and a major Zagreb business district with Franjo Tuđman Airport.
• The partners plan to expand the fully driverless operating area over the next few months.
• The service uses Pony.ai's seventh-generation Robotaxi with an L4 domain controller built on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX.
• Since the earlier operator-supervised service launched, the fleet has logged more than 200,000 km and several thousand customer rides; those operating figures are company-reported.

What is confirmed and what remains a company claim

The no-onboard-operator phase is confirmed by Pony.ai's release and local reporting. The 'European first' characterization is a company claim. Public data on remote interventions, disengagements and the exact transition date to a regular paid fully driverless service remain unavailable.

Why it matters

For Europe, this is a more meaningful milestone than another autonomy demo because passengers are being carried on public roads without an onboard safety operator. The next test is whether this becomes a regular commercial service with transparent safety and remote-assistance data.

What we are watching next

RoboMorrow will treat the next development as material only if it changes the editorial assessment: regular commercial launch, a new price, a new market, a major customer contract, operating results, a regulatory change or a verified change in deployment scale. A later article from another secondary outlet alone will not become a separate story.

Editorial decision: UPDATE the existing Pony.ai / Verne / Zagreb owner story; do not create another owner URL.

Market context

In robotics and autonomous mobility, the useful distinction is increasingly between a demonstration and commercialization. The important evidence here is therefore contract economics, formal permits, real-world deployment and measurable operating conditions. This is not a RoboMorrow hands-on review and no product score is assigned without physical testing.

Why this is genuinely an update to the existing story

Zagreb is not starting from zero. Pony.ai and Verne already had a commercial service, and rides became available through Uber in August. The difference is the human presence. The earlier phase used a licensed operator in the vehicle. The new phase allows invited passengers to take test rides with no onboard safety operator.

That is a qualitative change, but two concepts must remain separate. Fully driverless passenger test rides do not yet mean every user can order a regular paid ride with nobody in the car. Crossing that threshold will be the next major material event.

A 22 km airport route is more meaningful than a closed-course demo

The route connects Verne's headquarters and a major business district with Franjo Tuđman Airport. That exposes the system to public traffic, intersections, changing speeds and normal road-user behavior. At the same time, it remains a defined route rather than proof of unrestricted autonomy anywhere in the city.

Pony.ai says the operating area will expand over the next few months. The important measure will be the pace and complexity of that expansion. A broader ODD makes transparent data on safety and interventions increasingly valuable.

More than 200,000 km is useful context, not a complete safety case

The companies report more than 200,000 km of operations and several thousand customer rides since the earlier service launched. That is far beyond a trade-show demonstration and represents meaningful operating experience. Public information does not, however, provide a full breakdown of those kilometres by supervision mode, intervention frequency or incident category.

RoboMorrow therefore should not translate the mileage into a simplistic safe-or-unsafe score. Autonomous-driving safety requires denominators and definitions: how often the system requests help, what counts as an intervention, how many rides complete without assistance and how performance compares with human drivers in similar conditions.

Seventh-generation Robotaxi and redundancy

Pony.ai says the tests use its seventh-generation Robotaxi and an in-house Level 4 domain controller based on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX. The company describes 360-degree sensor coverage, multiple redundancy layers and fail-operational capability. Those are manufacturer statements rather than an independent safety assessment, but they indicate a production-oriented architecture rather than a minimal prototype.

The more important question is whether the vehicle can degrade safely after failures in sensing, compute, power or communications. In a truly driverless car, the emergency plan cannot depend on a human already sitting behind the wheel.

What needs to happen next

The next major milestone is a regular fare-charging service with no onboard operator. Publication of remote-assistance rules, operating-domain limits and meaningful safety data would also materially improve the story. Expansion across a larger part of Zagreb would count as an update; secondary coverage repeating today's announcement would not.

Zagreb remains one of Europe's most important robotaxi laboratories because it combines real customers, consumer apps, a local operator and international autonomous-driving technology. The project is best covered as a sequence of material milestones rather than as a new article every time another outlet writes about it.