The ride-hailing company is betting that Germany’s automotive heartland, and a less sensor-heavy approach to autonomy, can finally make robotaxis scale in Europe.
Munich is about to become a test of a particular theory: that the cheapest way to put a driverless taxi on a European street is to stop building special cars for it. Uber said on Sunday that it will launch a robotaxi programme in the German city alongside Autobrains, an Israeli autonomy firm, with the vehicles running on Nvidia’s DRIVE Hyperion platform.
The announcement was made at Nvidia’s GTC conference in Taipei, and the deployment is contingent on German regulatory approval.
The choice of city is not incidental. Munich is the home of BMW and a dense cluster of suppliers, and it offers the mix Uber says it wants: tight inner-city streets, fast ring roads, and what the company politely calls “a thoughtful German regulatory framework.”
Germany has had federal rules permitting driverless vehicles in defined operating areas since 2021, which makes it one of the few European markets where a Level 4 service is a paperwork problem rather than a legal impossibility.
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What is genuinely different here is the autonomy stack. Most robotaxis on the road today, the ones run by Waymo and its peers, depend on bespoke vehicles bristling with lidar and a single large end-to-end model trained to do everything at once.
Autobrains is selling the opposite. Its “agentic AI” breaks the driving task into specialised agents, each handling a slice of the problem, running on standard automotive sensors and ordinary automotive-grade compute. The pitch is that this is cheaper to build and easier to drop into any carmaker’s vehicle.
That last point is the commercial idea Uber keeps returning to. The three companies describe the programme as “OEM-agnostic,” meaning the software is meant to run across different manufacturers’ cars rather than a single custom fleet.
“Autonomous driving will not scale by relying on a single model to solve every driving scenario,” said Igal Raichelgauz, Autobrains’ chief executive and founder. “It requires systems that can reason, adapt, and make decisions under uncertainty.”
Uber, which sold its own self-driving unit in 2020, has spent the years since assembling exactly this kind of partnership rather than owning the technology.
It is the same template behind its Tokyo pilot with Wayve and Nissan and its tie-up with Pony.ai and Verne, whose vehicles became Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb earlier this year. Sarfraz Maredia, Uber’s global head of autonomous mobility, framed Munich in the same terms: the hard part, he said, “is bringing them into a commercial network where they can reliably serve riders at scale.”
Several things were left unsaid. The companies named no launch date, no fleet size, and no vehicle. They did not say which carmaker, if any, would supply the cars, nor whether early rides would carry safety operators, as they do in Zagreb.
The Munich plan also tracks a target Uber flagged last year, when it first signalled an intention to begin self-driving operations in the city, so the announcement firms up a timeline more than it sets a new one.
Europe has been the continent where robotaxis are announced more often than they are ridden. Munich is now on the list of places where that is supposed to change, pending a regulator’s signature.
