Stellantis has teamed up with Bolt and Pony.ai to start offering robotaxi rides in Luxembourg. Not the city, but the whole country. Adding to other pilots, ranging from Zagreb over Munich to London, 2026 is unfolding as the year when robotaxis finally land in Europe. 

Luxembourg is a small country, but apparently it has a big appetite for regulatory experimentation. The Grand Duchy has been developing a national framework for automated driving since at least 2025, positioning itself as what the partners call a “Living Lab” for autonomous mobility. In other words, a place where new technology can be tested in real traffic, with real passengers, under real regulatory scrutiny.

With safety driver

Stellantis doesn’t shy away from the opportunity offered by that official framework. It is teaming up with Chinese autonomous driving specialist Pony.ai and Bolt – Uber’s biggest competitor – to launch a robotaxi pilot program. The goal, stated plainly in the press release, is driverless operation by the end of the test period. This will last one year.

To be clear, the boundaries of the project are not confined to the capital of Luxemburg, but stretch to the country’s borders. Gradually. First trials start in the small town of Bissen, before the perimeter is expanded.

This makes for a contained environment where this automated taxi pilot, the first of its kind in Luxembourg, can be validated without the complexity of a buzzing capital city. A safety driver remains on board.

For Pony.ai in particular, it forms the next chapter of its strategy where it is using Europe’s increasingly more benign regulatory environment as stepping stones. The Chinese company is already running on-road tests in Zagreb, Croatia, as part of a separate partnership with Uber and Croatian start-up Verne. Luxembourg is the next dot on that map.

The vehicle is the mid-size van Peugeot Expert. It is built on Stellantis’s L4-Ready Platform, a modular architecture the automaker developed to underpin Level 4 autonomous solutions.

Breakeven

The autonomous driving system is Pony.ai’s seventh-generation (Gen-7) technology, the same generation it has been scaling in China. The program will validate safety, performance, and regulatory compliance under real Luxembourg traffic conditions.

So, Pony.ai provides the autonomous driving brain, Bolt handles the ride-booking platform and fleet operations, while Stellantis supplies the hardware and manufacturing expertise.

Importantly, in its home country, Pony.ai’s Gen-7 robotaxis have already reached breakeven. It is the only autonomous driving company to have publicly claimed commercially viable operation covering its own costs per ride. Globally, the Chinese company is targeting a fleet of over 3,000 robotaxis in 2026, up from around 1,000 at year-end 2025.

For Bolt and Stellantis, this is their first robotaxi project. For the US, the car giant has formalized an agreement with Nvidia and Uber. It aims for 5,000 robotaxi units, with mass production starting in 2028.