Miscellaneous

Why robotaxis will fail in Europe

May 15, 2025 9 mins (plus 20 mins of videos)

Tags: robotaxis tech uber urban planning

Top Hat and Tails
	Album: The Movies Author: Andrew Skeet
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They are killing machines (and jerks) by nature

Europe is one of the safest places in the world to drive in, and that’s no coincidence. Unlike in North America, where driving is seen as a necessity —and sometimes as a right by entitled drivers— in Europe there is a strong consciousness of road safety and driving is seen as a privilege with responsibilities attached into it. Because cars can kill people if they run out of control, and that extends to whoever is piloting it, whether it’s a machine, an algorithm, or a monkey.

Despite Cruise and Uber having heavily been marketing about self-driving cars becoming safer than human drivers, the truth of the matter is that not only they’ll never be infallible, but they have also been making dangerous issues so crazy that nobody expected in the first place: From suddenly stopping at a busy road, resulting in a crash that injured 9 people, to dragging a woman underneath their wheels for several meters as it tried to pull over when she got pushed under the robotaxi by a human driver.

Cruiser actually tried to hide the fact that “continued to drive” part of the latter accident, something that they did admit a year afterwards.

	I don’t know about you, but I have zero interest in getting rammed by a 1.5 ton car because of a software bug in their automatic driving system. Or worse, since they may as well be connected via Internet, one could exploit a security vulnerability in their systems and hijack the remote control systems they have, something that I will mention furhter below.

Europe is a very regulation-heavy region, and as such a lot of new products and services are scrutinized from many different angles, from safety to even the sociocultural consequences it may bring. Driving is not alone on this, as already road regulations are way more strict and fines for both drivers and car companies can be pretty substantial.

These regulations and their enforcement are so strong that they’ve managed to make dents into multi-billion dolar companies like Apple, so it’s no wonder they can shoo away smaller companies like Deliveroo. But they pay off: Europe has the lowest death toll in road accidents per 100,000 inhabitants than in most regions in the world, surpassed only by the significantly more desolate Australia (and Antarctica); a remarkable statistic considering the United States, where most robotaxis are being deployed, have remained somewhat constant for the past few 10 years.

Considering their strong consciousness on trying to keep roadkill as low as possible, do you really think that Europe is willing to let something that could pose a serious threat to that goal let loose? Of course not.

And if you think that this may pose a lost opportunity for Europe to make money, the next point will address that.

They are not “made in Europe”

This is a bit of an addendum to the former reason. Since these cars come from foreign markets, there’s no direct economic incentive to let them in. You might think that this is an opportunity for Europe to make money, but a significant portion of the euros spent on them would essentially leave the European Union.

In actuality, it’s mostly for the benefit of these foreign companies, who need to gobble up venture capital to self-sustain themselves. Fueled by the need to get that precious funding, Uber and Cruise are required to grow and expand, which is what got everyone to this situation in the first place.

But this is of no interest to the EU, especially now that they are slowly turning more into anti-globalization and have a distinctive “made in Europe” industry. And yet still, even if there were to be incentives for more startups to be made, the European Union insists on making a green industry. Cars, as proven in decades of research, are the worst type of transportation in emission efficiency, even electric ones.

	This is especially true in Western Europe, where public transport projects are subsidized, whilst even domestic car manufacturers such as Volskwagen are subject to large fines if they don’t meet their quota of EVs.

There’s no room to give for cars, literally

During the 1950s, spurred on by the belief that cars were the future of transportation, the United States began designing their cities to fit around them —and Canada followed suit. But cars tend to be pretty big and in no way they are as compact as other methods of transportation compared to something like a bus or a tram, so this meant that minor streets would need to be made wider.

	Actually, cars are getting bigger and bigger, and in the US, the top selling personal use vehicle for over 40 years has been the Ford F-150.

	But they’re SO BIG and cool.

	Are you kidding me? That’s a pickup truck! You’d only need one if you want to tow heavy stuff, like farmers and construction workers usually do.

	You gotta buy groceries, though.

	Geez, how much do you eat!?

While North American cities back in the day may have had some streets that were wider than the European counterparts, this wasn’t the norm everywhere. And even then, there’s the unavoidable issue of having to provide them with parking space.

In the US and Canada, cities are required to have a minimum amount of parking space. And without resorting to multiple floor or underground parking —which is pretty unusual for some reason— they were forced to take down a lot of buildings. A lot of commercial space also had to be destroyed to fit the cars, which is why you can find so many drive-thru commercial spaces there.

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Europe did have some history of adapting their cities to cars, but this trend has reversed in recent years, particularly in the Western side. And while many people argue that “European cities have plenty of buildings from the Middle Ages worth preserving”, the truth is that historical buildings in the US were bulldozed for the car. This also has removed the necessity for parking spots with minor economic impact.

	In Spain it’s still a common belief that as rural to city facilitators, cars boosted the economy of smaller cities with villages around them. But I’m skeptical about whether growing cities like my hometown, which have villages being yet to fully be incorporated as neighborhoods, would truly benefit from this.

Another common complaint from drivers is that many cities in Europe have streets built prior to the invention of the automobile which are too narrow to drive through, and this is true, but only to an extent.

Old-school carriages were actually about the same size or larger than the contemporary counterpart of the car, and if you include the horses, it could be as large as many SUVs in the United States today. And that’s without mentioning the historical iterations of the horse carriage, which have influenced wide roads into urban design as far back as Roman times.

Don’t make me bring the Carthaginian elephants into this.

But in the case of the streets wide enough for cars, the thing nowadays is that European cities are quickly pedestrianizing the streets that used to be, at first, mixed-use between pedestrians, carriages, trams and the first cars, and then cars were given priority.

To put it all back into context, the little to no room for robotaxis to drive is decreasing, and Europe right now is being particularly protective about what’s already been built, so they will not be so keen as to give that space back to self-driving cars.

Would somebody please think of the workers!?

There’s also the concerns of how many jobs it will robotaxis destroy over those that are created, and while that’s something that is yet to see, we’ve seen a similar story unfold many years ago with Uber.

While Uber was taking off in the United States, sentiment about its service sparked a lot of resent from traditional taxi drivers in Europe, and led to strict regulations about how they should coexist with licensed taxi drivers, despite Uber trying to brush them off countless times.

Labor culture in Europe is very different than that of the United States in that there is a particular focus in respecting worker’s interests over pursuing potential profitability, resulting in many countries implementing a lot of protections towards them, but are very restricting to a company’s ability to make money in overly humongous quantities.

This goes completely against Uber and Waymo’s interests of achieving as much growth as possible, with the purpose of capitalizing gains to satisfy investors afterwards.

A conflict of interest like this may be equally true for robotaxis, if the hypothesis of them being more profitable driving around town than parked while waiting for the next customer is correct. Robotaxis still require human supervision fairly regularly despite their improvements. Especially in central Europe, work hours are decreasing, but these self driving cars would basically be working nearly the entirety of a day. Adding up other concerns about job automation, these give raise to opposing views that are simply bound to cause issues.

The innovation argument

There are a lot of critics saying that Europe should be focusing on innovation rather than regulation, and for some economic and geopolitical reasons, this makes sense. But I feel that in the matter of transportation, it may be debatable that Europe may be “behind the rest of the world”, because most often, the argument falls into marketable stuff such as electric cars, and express delivery services, among other things.

Surely pluggable hybrids have been a huge struggle for European car makers, but in terms of road infrastructure, Europe seems to be the undisputable leading force of innovation.

Many of the types of road infrastructure around are actually European designs, especially modern ones like this turbo roundabout in the Netherlands. Roundabouts are just starting to be built in the US, but most driving tests hardly cover them, despite proven to be safer than regular intersections.

	I like to think that in the US, innovation is made possible everywhere at the same time in order to tap as many places as possible to find “oil” (an opportunity of making huge loads of money). But in Europe, innovation is focused on things that could make good to the world. So we may not have loads of cash, but at least Europe provides better stuff. Or at least that’s the idea anyway.

So while Europe will briefly have the magic of self driving cars, they probably won’t last long, and the lives of the Europeans should stay the same good as always. There are opportunities for entrepreneurship; all you have to do is to look in the right places.