DRIVERLESS TAXIS ARRIVE IN EUROPE — UBER AND WERIDE LAUNCH ROBOTAXI SERVICE IN MADRID WeRide, Uber, and Spanish fleet operator AVOMO announced on June 2, 2026 that they are launching the first commercial robotaxi pilot service in Madrid, marking the opening of autonomous vehicle operations in a major European capital. Rides will be bookable through the standard Uber app. The vehicles are WeRide’s GXR model, which uses an L4-level redundant drive-by-wire chassis architecture. Madrid becomes WeRide’s twelfth city globally and Spain becomes its fifth European market. The rollout follows a structure that has become standard in the robotaxi industry. Vehicles will initially carry trained human operators capable of intervening if needed. As the service accumulates safety data and meets predefined performance milestones, WeRide and Uber have committed to expanding toward fully driverless commercial service across broader urban areas and adding hundreds of vehicles to the fleet. The Madrid Regional Government is a partner in the pilot, which matters because regulatory buy-in at the city level has been one of the consistent barriers to autonomous vehicle expansion in Europe. Getting the Comunidad de Madrid on board as an institutional partner, not just a regulatory observer, is a meaningful shift. For Uber, the Madrid launch is part of a strategy of using autonomous vehicle partnerships to build a global robotaxi network without owning any of the underlying technology. Uber is the distribution layer. The AV companies bring the vehicles and the software. Nvidia, which announced a partnership with Uber for robotaxi operations in 28 cities at GTC 2026, is another piece of the same architecture. The question for Europe is whether Madrid is the start of rapid expansion or whether the regulatory patchwork across EU member states makes it a years-long slog city by city. Keywords: Uber WeRide robotaxi Madrid, autonomous vehicles Europe, self-driving taxis Spain, robotaxi launch 2026