Europe has spent years watching American and Chinese robotaxis pile up the miles. This week, it started to look like a race of its own. On Wednesday, at NVIDIA's GTC Berlin conference, the Estonian ride-hailing company Bolt said it had chosen NVIDIA's self-driving software to power a European robotaxi programme that will begin in Madrid in 2027. The plan is to lay the foundations for at least 25,000 driverless-ready Lucid cars, and Bolt wants 100,000 autonomous vehicles on its platform by 2035.

It came a day after Waymo said it was heading to the Spanish capital too, and alongside a string of announcements from Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Volvo and others that all point the same way. NVIDIA wants to be the supplier that every European carmaker and taxi operator builds on, and it had a good day making that case.

What Bolt announced

Bolt has picked NVIDIA's Alpamayo Stack, a complete self-driving software package, to drive the cars in its autonomous ride-hailing service. The first vehicles will be built by the American electric car maker Lucid and will run on NVIDIA's Hyperion platform, the combination of computers and sensors that the software runs on. Bolt says the cars will be "Level 4-ready", meaning they are designed to drive themselves without a human in charge within set areas and conditions.

The Madrid work will start modestly. Bolt told Reuters it expects "tens of vehicles" on the city's streets next year, and the first job is gathering real-world driving data to develop and check the system, subject to regulatory approval. Germany and France are named as the next key markets, and Bolt told Reuters it is aiming for major French and German cities by the end of 2027.

Jevgeni Kabanov, Bolt's president and head of autonomous driving, said Madrid was chosen because the region has created a testing permit that allows limited commercial operations before full approval. He also told Reuters the driving software runs entirely inside the car, without connecting to the internet, for cybersecurity reasons. "Our ambition isn't to bring autonomous driving to just a handful of cities," he said.

Bolt is not starting from scratch. It already has an autonomous service in Luxembourg and works with Pony.ai and Stellantis. With more than 200 million customers across over 50 countries, it has the one thing robotaxi technology firms often lack: an app people already use to book rides.

Why Madrid, and why now

Madrid is quickly becoming Europe's robotaxi test track. On Tuesday Waymo, owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, said it would begin driving its electric Jaguar I-PACE cars on the region's roads within days, with trained specialists behind the wheel at first, and aims to carry its first passengers in 2027. Spain's traffic authority, the DGT, issued its first national testing permits to WeRide and Uber last month, with commercial services expected in Madrid by the end of this year.

That means at least three serious groups are lining up in one European city. For Bolt, it is also a statement of intent: a European company wants a large share of Europe's driverless future rather than leaving it to Waymo and the Chinese specialists.

NVIDIA's bigger play

Bolt was the headline, but NVIDIA's announcement went much wider. Volvo Cars is adopting Hyperion and the Alpamayo software. Mercedes-Benz is extending its partnership for more advanced self-driving features, and said its MB.DRIVE ASSIST PRO system, built with NVIDIA, will soon be approved for point-to-point driver assistance in German cities. Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles showed its driverless ID. Buzz AD van on Hyperion, the Swedish firm Einride is building its autonomous freight lorries on it, and suppliers including Aptiv, Valeo and Schaeffler are making Hyperion-based computers for carmakers to use.

NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang called robotaxis "the first mass-market application of robotics and physical AI". The company also launched Halos SAFE, a framework for producing measurable evidence that a self-driving system is safe, with testing firms including TÜV Rheinland involved. It added a new two-billion-parameter driving model, Alpamayo 2 Edge, designed to run inside the car and update ten times a second.

The pattern is clear. Rather than every carmaker building its own self-driving brain, NVIDIA is offering a ready-made, shared foundation. That could speed things up dramatically for European firms that have fallen behind. It also means a lot of Europe's driverless future may end up running on one American company's chips and software.

The UK angle

Britain featured too. Huang said next-generation vehicles from JLR, the maker of Range Rover and Jaguar, will be compatible with Hyperion, and JLR is listed as part of the Halos SAFE safety-testing group. That does not mean driverless JLR cars are coming soon, but it puts Britain's biggest carmaker inside the same technology family as Mercedes and Volvo.

It is also a useful contrast with London, where the homegrown firm Wayve is taking a different approach, selling its own AI driver to carmakers and partnering with Uber. As we reported this week, driverless trials in the capital are already meeting organised opposition from cab drivers. Madrid's relatively clear permit system is one reason operators are going there first.

What happens next

A few dozen data-collecting cars in 2027 is a long way from 25,000 robotaxis, and every step depends on regulators. Bolt's timeline for France and Germany is ambitious, and the move from cars with safety drivers to cars with nobody at the wheel is where most robotaxi plans have slowed down in the past. Lucid will also need to build the vehicles at volume.

Still, the direction of travel has changed. A year ago, Europe's robotaxi story was mostly about American and Chinese companies arriving. Now a European ride-hailing firm, Europe's biggest carmakers and the world's most valuable chip company are lining up behind a shared plan. Madrid in 2027 is where we will find out whether it works on real streets.