Paris had quite a day. At the Assises du Véhicule Autonome, Wayve, Stellantis, NVIDIA, and the French government announced a collaboration to build a full autonomous-vehicle ecosystem in France — and hours later, a Reuters report revealed that ride-hailing firm Bolt, Greater Paris, and Stellantis are separately planning an autonomous driving pilot in the capital for 2028. Two robotaxi bets, one city, one day.
The Wayve announcement is the bigger structural play. According to Wayve's press release, it fuses Stellantis's L4-Ready Platforms and vehicle manufacturing with Wayve's AI Driver running NVIDIA's Halos OS on the Hyperion compute and sensor architecture — a deliberate stack spanning the whole value chain "from silicon to vehicles," anchored in France. Wayve points to the country's ride-hailing market, one of Europe's largest, and the €109 billion in AI investment announced at last year's Paris AI Action Summit. The framing is bluntly geopolitical: strengthen the European ecosystem to compete globally in autonomous driving.
The Bolt news is the sharper near-term signal. The pilot would start in municipalities northwest of Paris in 2028, with commercial operations targeted for 2030, explicitly designed to "inform public decision-making" on wider deployment, per Greater Paris president Patrick Ollier. Bolt is also testing AVs in Madrid in 2027 using NVIDIA's Alpamayo stack and Lucid vehicles, with stated ambitions of 25,000 vehicles and scaling to 100,000 by 2035. Chinese self-driving firm Pony.ai is a potential technology provider for the Paris pilot.
Stellantis showing up in both announcements is the detail worth watching. Europe's automakers have mostly watched the robotaxi race from the sidelines — Waymo in the US, Pony.ai and Apollo in China. Stellantis is now placing chips on two different Paris plays simultaneously: Wayve's embodied-AI stack for the long game, Bolt's ride-hailing fleet for deployment volume. It wants to be the chassis of Europe's robotaxi future whichever software wins.
What to watch: whether France converts this momentum into actual permitting and street testing — robotaxi announcements are easy, riders are hard — and whether the French government's backing translates into Europe-wide regulatory alignment that lets Paris compete with Phoenix, Austin, and Shenzhen for real-world miles.
— via EV Magz