On 2 June 2026, WeRide, Uber, and the fleet operator AVOMO announced plans to launch Spain’s first commercial robotaxi pilot in the Region of Madrid, in collaboration with the regional government. According to Uber’s investor press release, it is “the companies’ first joint entry into the European market,” with rides “available via the Uber app” and operations “expected to begin operations later this year.”
The pilot starts conservatively. The fleet will “initially include trained vehicle operators,” with the partners “committed to adding hundreds of Robotaxis as key performance milestones are met, including the expansion of fully driverless commercial service across core urban areas.” The announcement frames Madrid as the fourth of fifteen cities under an earlier WeRide-Uber agreement, with eleven more planned by 2030, building on fully driverless services already running in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
The move matters because Europe has been slower than the US, China, and the Gulf to host commercial robotaxis, partly due to a denser regulatory environment. A named European deployment with a regional government as a partner is a concrete data point in the long, often over-promised story of self-driving cars. For businesses, it signals that autonomous mobility is expanding city by city through cautious, operator-supervised pilots rather than sudden nationwide rollouts.