Verne 在 Zagreb 無人駕駛的士合作中首日便選定 Uber 作聚合平台

On 26 March 2026 Uber, Verne and Pony.ai announced a three-way deal to bring robotaxis to Europe. Pony.ai supplies the autonomous driving, Croatian company Verne buys the cars and keeps them on the road, Uber brings the network. That same announcement already stated that rides would be bookable "via Uber as well as through Verne's app", and that Uber "intends to invest an undisclosed amount into Verne".

Two weeks later, on 8 April, Europe's first commercial robotaxi service started in Zagreb: Verne's app, about ninety square kilometres of the city including the airport, from seven in the morning to nine at night.

On 19 August the rides also appeared on Uber's app, with a licensed operator on board behind the wheel, Verne acting as fleet owner and service operator. On 10 September the first rides with nobody at the wheel began, on the twenty-two kilometres to the airport: test rides for invited passengers, while the commercial service kept the operator on board. On 7 October the investment was confirmed by Verne's chief executive, Marko Pejković: "I can confirm, yes, Uber has invested in Verne." The size of the stake was not disclosed.

The press covered the machine. For anyone coordinating a fleet, the thing to look at is different, and it is not an ambush: it is a choice. Europe's most advanced operator, the one that actually owns the driverless cars and has its own app, decided from day one to also go through the aggregator's app, and to let the aggregator into its capital.

If that is what the company with the robotaxis does, it is worth asking what a dispatch company will do: one with the shifts, the licences and thirty years of customers, but without a list to restart from.

The script has been written before, with today's cars

You do not need to wait for robotaxis to see how this ends. It has already happened twice, with human drivers.

August 2020: Uber buys Autocab, the British company that supplies booking and dispatch software to private hire operators, which is to say to its own competitors. On 29 March 2021 the UK competition authority closed its inquiry finding "no competition concerns", and the deal completed in April.

It is worth reading why it closed. The authority had considered exactly the data question, whether operators might be pushed into handing data to Uber, and set it aside by observing that there are "other credible suppliers" those operators "could switch" to if the service worsened or if data were demanded. In other words: in the authority's reasoning, the protection is not a promise, it is being able to leave.

The operators' main question at the time was the same one: what happens to our data. Autocab answered that it would handle them as always, without sharing. No abuse has emerged since, and that is not the point. The point is that the answer was a statement and not a clause, while the real guarantee had already been named by the regulator: the ability to walk away.

April 2025: Lyft buys FreeNow for 175 million euros. It was not buying cars. Ninety per cent of the gross bookings on that platform in 2024 came from taxis, which is to say from other people's vehicles and licences.

In both cases whoever was driving stayed at the wheel. What changed is who stands on the other side: in the first the supplier became the competitor, in the second the app changed owner.

Why the legal frame does not help here

In Italy the instinctive answer is that none of this applies yet, since the road code defines a vehicle as a machine "driven by a human" and a car that drives itself does not fit. Testing is nonetheless governed by the 2018 Smart Road decree.

But those rules defend the licence, not the relationship with the person getting into the car. No law obliges a passenger to call one number rather than another. Customers go where booking is easier, and they do not ask anyone's permission.

Original (Italian): A Zagabria anche l'operatore locale passa da Uber

Disclosure: I build UrbanGo, dispatch software for licensed taxi and private-hire operators. Everything above is sourced; this paragraph is the part where I sell something.