Europe's Driverless Week Showed Three Meanings of Level 4
Madrid, Zagreb and Zürich all crossed autonomy milestones between September 9 and 10. The labels matched, but the human was in a different seat each time.
Three European autonomy announcements landed within two days, and each company used the words "Level 4."
On September 9, Zürich Airport said it had taken the onboard safety driver out of two WeRide shuttles. On September 10, Spain's traffic authority, the DGT, granted WeRide, Uber and AVOMO the country's first national permit for Level 4 autonomous passenger vehicles. The same day, Pony.ai and Croatian operator Verne started fully driverless test rides with passengers on public roads in Zagreb.
Put side by side, the three show why "Level 4" alone tells you very little. The SAE level describes what the software is designed to handle. It doesn't say where the human is. In Madrid the human sits in the car. In Zürich the human sits in a control room. In Zagreb, for invited riders on one route, no human is aboard at all.
Madrid: a national permit with a person in the car
The Spanish permit is the most significant regulatory step of the three, and also the most cautious in practice. It was issued under the DGT's ES-AV framework for testing automated vehicles on open roads. It covers 20 WeRide GXR vehicles in the Greater Madrid region, working with Madrid's regional government. For now the permit allows mapping, route validation and operational-readiness testing, with every vehicle "under the supervision of an in-car vehicle specialist." The partners are aiming for commercial operations by the end of 2026, depending on further regulatory milestones.
WeRide says this is its ninth autonomous-driving permit worldwide and the first EU national approval for the GXR. Madrid is the fourth of 15 cities planned under WeRide's partnership with Uber, with 11 more by 2030. AVOMO, the autonomous-vehicle unit of Moove Cars Group, runs the fleet.
The permit matters as a precedent, not for its size. A national framework means the next Spanish city is an administrative process, not a new negotiation. What it is not, by its own terms, is driverless — yet.
Zürich: the human moves to a control room
Zürich Airport's shuttles show the next arrangement. WeRide's buses run a fixed employee route on a separated airport corridor that never crosses aircraft taxiways. They have been in development since March 2025 and have logged more than 15,000 kilometers. In early September the first fully automated runs began with nobody on board. Supervision moved to a remote cockpit at the airport's innovation hub, staffed by Swissport and Krummen Kerzers. Former onboard drivers were retrained as remote supervisors.
The first Level 4 runs carry no passengers. Employees are expected to ride after about four more weeks of testing, and the trial runs through the end of 2026.
Airport officials were open about the economics. The goal is that one employee may eventually monitor several buses instead of riding in one. That one sentence is the whole business case for autonomy. As long as there's one human per vehicle, you've swapped a driver for a supervisor at similar cost. Savings start only when one person watches many vehicles, and Zürich said so plainly.
Zagreb: nobody aboard, on one route
Zagreb went furthest. Pony.ai and Verne began fully driverless rides for invited passengers on a 22-kilometer route linking Verne's headquarters, a main business district and Franjo Tuđman Airport, under Croatia's rules for autonomous testing with passengers. The companies call it a European first. They plan to extend driverless operation over the coming months until it covers Verne's whole Zagreb service area.
The service behind it launched in early April 2026. Since then it has logged more than 200,000 kilometers and several thousand customer rides, with an average rating of 4.7 out of 5. The vehicle is Pony.ai's seventh-generation robotaxi, built on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX hardware running NVIDIA's DriveOS. Pony.ai says it has driven more than 100 million kilometers worldwide, 40 million-plus of them fully driverless, and is targeting 3,500-plus robotaxis across 20-plus cities by the end of 2026.
Even so, "invited passengers on a defined route" is a testing setup, not open commercial service. It's the strongest claim of the week, and it still has limits.
What the three share
Two things stand out.
First, all three stacks are Chinese. WeRide in Madrid and Zürich, Pony.ai in Zagreb. Europe's first real steps toward removing the driver are running on software from Chinese developers, with American and European partners handling the rider app, the fleet or the regulatory relationship. Flux covered how that division of labor works in Uber's Pony.ai deal last month. This week showed it spreading into national permits.
Second, the progress is in supervision, not capability. None of these launches revealed a new driving skill. Each one moved a human somewhere else: from the driver's seat to the passenger seat, from the vehicle to a control room, or out of the loop on one validated route. That's how autonomy actually scales, one supervision change at a time, each earned with kilometers and approved by a regulator.
What to watch
Madrid's first driverless ride. The permit's real test is when the DGT lets the in-car specialist leave. That date will show how far Spain's framework is willing to go.
Zürich's supervision ratio. If the airport reaches one remote supervisor for several buses and publishes that number, it becomes the most useful data point in European autonomy.
Zagreb's route map. Pony.ai says driverless coverage will expand over "the next few months." Whether that means the whole city by year-end or a handful of corridors will show how much of this is operational and how much is a milestone announcement.