Hands off – driverless shuttles roll out across Europe
2025 marks a watershed year for autonomous vehicles. With Tesla readying its driverless taxi launch later in June, Waymo planning services with Uber in London and WeRide running a service in Zurich, the advent of autonomous vehicles gets a significant boost. Governments are also speeding up regulations to allow driverless vehicles on public roads.
Unlike the US, the key for Europe has been mass transport with autonomous shuttles and even buses rather than driverless taxis. From Paris to Hamburg, Barcelona to Dunfermline, many projects over the last ten years have demonstrated electric shuttles and even full-sized buses, and that has accelerated recently as regulators catch up. This approach allowed the shuttles to be used in closed trials on private land, limiting the safety risks and allowing the technology to be tested out, but now the shuttles are working on public roads.
Paris Open
WeRide returned to the Paris Open tennis tournament with French car maker Renault, running a service on Paris streets that are notoriously hard to navigate. This time it is operating at night, from 10pm to midnight, s well as during the day, with in-house developed camera sensors alongside solid state LiDAR laser sensors, 4D millimetre-wave imaging radar and blind spot LiDAR to give a 360-degree Field of View (FoV) with a front detection range up to 300 meters.
WeRide and Renault also operated what it calls a robobus trial service in central Barcelona, their first-ever test in Spain of an autonomous vehicle for public transport operating at Level 4 of the Society of Automotive Engineers. This is used for autonomous operation in a restricted range of conditions, such as set roads, while level 5 is for operation on any roads.
EU alliance to push driverless vehicle technologies, large scale pilots
The Chinese company is also running autonomous shuttles with beti Automated Mobility and insurance company Macif in France’s Drôme region for the Movin’On Community of Interest on Automated Vehicles (CIVA). This is WeRide’s first fully driverless commercial European deployment of its robobus and makes WeRide the only technology company worldwide to hold driverless permits across five countries: China, the UAE, Singapore, France, and the US.
“Our collaboration with beti allows us to execute our inaugural commercial robobus deployment in Europe, utilizing our proven track record in the Chinese, Singaporean, and Middle Eastern markets, and ultimately reinforcing our position as a global leader in L4 autonomous driving deployment and commercialization.” said Jennifer Li, CFO and Head of International Business at WeRide.
Under the 2019 PACTE law, acquiring a driverless permit in France requires approval from multiple government agencies, coordinated by the Directorate General for Energy and Climate (DGEC), in collaboration with the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Ecological Transition. The process involves thorough evaluations of technical documents, safety protocols, and operational plans. WeRide and beti completed this rigorous process in three months, setting a record for France’s fastest driverless permit approval.
The hypervisor technology from beti reacts to alerts, stop the vehicle, monitor service, providing a second layer of safety for automated driving and ensuring continuous improvement of the system.
“Following successful trials conducted over the past year by Renault Group and its partner WeRide, the beginnings of a passenger transport service using automated shuttles are now being set up in Valence,” said Patrick Vergelas, Head of Autonomous Mobility Projects, Renault Group.
“Macif, as initiator and pilot of the project, is particularly interested in this deployment, whose observation will feed its work and underpin its support for the development of a collective format for automated mobility,” he said.
The 3.3 km route serves the train station, the off-site long-term parking area, the business park’s catering hub and about 150 companies, employing nearly 3,000 people on the 162-hectare site. The robobus runs at up to 40km/h with dynamic obstacle avoidance and in July 2025 it is extending the trial with fully autonomous operation, removing the safety operator and using remote monitoring via the 5G network.
Driverless VW id.Buzz shuttles
Rather than developing a custom vehicle, Volkswagen is also using its id.buzz electric vehicle as the basis of its driverless shuttle offering. The vehicle has been tested in Germany and the USA by Volkswagen ADMT (Autonomous Driving Mobility & Transport) over the last two years, working with Mobileye in Israel using its SuperVision and Chauffeur platforms. It is now rolling out in the US with Uber.
The self-driving system (SDS) module has two independent high-performance computers for redundancy as well as 13 cameras, nine lidar and five radar units, and each system is capable of producing 360 degree surroundings.
A constant online connection provides the autonomous vehicles with swarm data from other road users about the traffic situation uses 5G cellular v2x links while updating the three-dimensional maps.
“Bringing autonomous shuttles on the road in large quantities requires cooperation from strong partners,” says Christian Senger, member of the Board of Management at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, responsible for ADMT.
Hamburg is a hotbed of testing for driverless shuttles, having run several individual trials and now combining 20 vehicles of two types with different networks and service operators.
Volkswagen subsidiary MOIA is using four driverless id-Buzz vehicles later this year in the €26m ALIKE project, alongside the 15 seater Mover from vehicle manufacturers Holon, a subsidiary of tier one automotive supplier Benteler and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
German company DRM Datenraum Mobilität is also using the project to develop a use case for the European data space in the mobility sector in which data can be shared. The service can be booked through an app and runs through this year. Holon, which has its first production plant in Jacksonville, Florida, is also extending trials of the vehicle into the middle of Germany later in 2025.
UK driverless shuttle regulations
Another key example of the move to autonomous vehicles is in the UK where the initial legislation is being updated to speed up the introduction of autonomous vehicles with a consultation on the safety guidelines and how to identify the vehicles.
The revised Automated passenger services (APS) regulations aim to allow commercial pilots of services with paying passengers and no safety driver in the UK from spring 2026.
The APS permitting regime was created to address complexities of applying current taxi, private hire vehicle, and public service vehicle legislation to passenger services that would operate without a driver.
The government points to UK AI developer Wayve which is backed by Nvidia, Softbank and Microsoft, as a key example of technology expertise.
The consultation will run for 12 weeks alongside a draft statutory instrument (SI) on protecting marketing terms for AVs as part of the Autonomous Vehicle Act. This sets out an authorisation process to determine whether a vehicle can safely drive itself without being controlled or monitored by a human.
“We want to support the innovators and businesses which are building genuinely groundbreaking tech by protecting certain terms so they can only be used to describe authorised self-driving vehicles, boosting investor confidence, consumer trust and driver certainty,” said Lilian Greenwood, minister for the future of roads in the UK Department of Transport.
This consultation aims to identify the words, expressions, symbols or marks that should only be used to describe authorised Avs in secondary legislation that will come into effect in early 2026.
The Department for Transport’s monitoring and annual reporting will consider performance against these principles. The AV Act specifies that the safety principles must be framed with a view to securing that authorised AVs achieve a safety level equal to or higher than careful and competent human drivers and that road safety in Great Britain will improve due to the presence of these vehicles.
“I intend to publish a further consultation on the statutory principles in the coming months that will be informed by stakeholder feedback from this call for evidence,” she said, pointing out this is a key part of a new, 23 point Transport AI action plan.
Six projects in the UK are testing out autonomous shuttles, with several as the second generation tests in Scotland, Milton Keynes and Cambridge.
The CAVForth2 project extends the route of the existing CAVForth autonomous bus service, from Edinburgh Park station to Dunfermline city centre, 20 miles (32km) away. This is using an upgraded version of the CAVStar ADS (Automated Drive System) that will be developed by Fusion Processing in Bristol during the project as well as the latest Enviro100AEV electric bus from Alexander Dennis.
The Connector project in Cambridge is trialling three self-driving vehicles providing passenger services from Park & Ride sites to the University and Biomedical Campus, using a private 5G network to help ensure continuity of service.
The ‘Harlander Project’ will establish an autonomous shuttle service in Belfast Harbour Estate providing a last mile connectivity between the rail link at Titanic Quarter railway station and Queen’s Road, while the Solihull & Coventry Automated Links Evolution (SCALE) project will operate a new fleet of shittles from Ohmio of New Zealand linking Birmingham International rail station, the NEC and Birmingham Business Park.
An Advanced Mobility Shuttle project in Sunderland is running between a key transport interchange and two high-volume destinations: the University of Sunderland City Campus and Sunderland Royal Hospital, via an Intelligent Transport Corridor (ITC). Angoka is providing secure communications with self-driving software from Oxa in Oxford.
StreetCAV in Milton Keynes is also using the Ohmio vehicles for rollout in the city centre later this year, but this is not just about the shuttles. This is also developing a cost effective high density and ultra-low latency street-side small cell radio equipment to connect to any autonomous vehicles using direct line-of-sight along the whole route in order to enable the low latency and ubiquitous connectivity. This will also demonstrate enhanced situational awareness or advanced monitoring capabilities in a form-factor that is acceptable to local planners, retailers, hospitality venues for deployment on a street pole or on lamp posts, signage and bus stops.
This will also add in non-terrestrial, space-enabled, satellite backhaul-based networks, exploitation of direct-to-handset services, use of high-altitude platforms or integration of OpenRAN wireless capability as part of the roadmap to boost the rollout of shuttles across Europe in 2026.
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