Are things finally on the move?

19 March 2026

On the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles and other US cities, robotaxis are already part of everyday life. Waymo’s shuttles have now covered hundreds of millions of driverless kilometres in the US – and, according to the Google subsidiary, they are much safer on the road than human drivers. Trials of what are known as Level 4 vehicles have now also started in Germany. To start with, there will still be a safety driver on board, but this individual will no longer be needed after about two years. Read on to find out which projects are happening where and how the safety of the robotaxis is being tested.

Something is on the move on the streets of Hamburg: self-driving VW e-buses have been on the road in the Wandsbek and Hamburg-Nord districts since 2025. Both vehicles are from the ID range. The level 4 vehicles mentioned above go by the name of Buzz AD. They can drive completely independently in a defined area or up to certain maximum speeds and are monitored from a control centre. Having a safety driver behind the wheel is a purely temporary measure – and initial reports suggests that he or she only has to intervene in a few cases: the vehicles change lanes smoothly, give way, give cyclists a sufficiently wide berth and stop automatically at traffic lights, the Bild newspaper reports. Passers-by who want to cross the street are recognised by the sensor systems, which have built-in redundancy, even in pouring rain, according to broadcaster NDR.

Since the first autonomous buses hit the road in Bad Birnbach in Lower Bavaria in 2017, a lot seems to have happened: These early robobuses would carefully edge forwards at a leisurely 15 kilometres per hour over short, fixed and simple routes and behave like overcautious or even uncertain novice drivers. If a vehicle happened to stop in front of a robobus, the safety driver would have to take the wheel to navigate around the obstacle. “There really is a world of difference between these first test vehicles and today’s systems,” says Katrin Leicht, expert in the homologation of automated and autonomous vehicles at TÜV NORD. “If you don't look at the steering wheel, you often won’t notice that the vehicle is driving itself.”

This doesn’t mean that they can already make their own decisions in every situation. For example, if an overtaking manoeuvre would inevitably involve crossing a solid line on the road, the regulation provides for the vehicle to call the control centre as a fallback to get permission to go ahead. And this is absolutely right, says Ms. Leicht. After all, the vehicles are programmed to be exemplary road users and to strictly adhere to the road traffic laws at all times. Humans are currently still needed as a fallback when it comes to granting permission for the rules to be broken on a case-by-case basis.

Hamburg is far from being the only place in Germany where Level 4 vehicles are being tested. VW is also testing its self-driving minibuses in Berlin and Munich. In the district of Ludwigslust-Parchim in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, an automated on-demand bus will commence trials this year, and in Burgdorf near Hanover, a Level 4 regular bus has been mixing with other road traffic since September 2025, in a real first for Germany. In both cases, the autonomous driving system comes from the Berlin-based start-up Motor AI.

Expectations are high: Manufacturers like VW hope to have a share in what will be a multi-billion-euro market. Transport companies aim to supplement their services with flexible on-demand shuttles and use self-driving buses in peripheral locations or rural areas that currently aren’t profitable or where human drivers are in short supply.

By 2035, Berlin’s BVG, Hamburg’s Hochbahn and Munich’s MVZ are seeking to press a total of around 2,000 autonomous public transport vehicles into service on the streets of their cities. The first, fully approved roboshuttles and 30-passenger buses are scheduled to go into use in regular operations as early as 2028. VW goes even further in its assessment that it will be granted approval for driverless operation in Hamburg by the Federal Motor Transport Authority by 2027.

That isn’t far away. But there’s still a lot to do before the long-awaited promise of self-driving cars can actually become reality in Germany. After all, the roboshuttles still currently need a test permit to be on the road. To obtain EU type approval for regular operation, the vehicles have to meet strict requirements. Compliance with these requirements must be comprehensively checked by a technical service offered by specialists such as Katrin Leicht and her team of experts. Emergency braking manoeuvres, for example, are monitored in a risk-free environment at the test site. Once they’re on the road, the experts test how the vehicles move in traffic – whether they can reliably recognise signs, traffic lights and people at all times and also cope with four-lane junctions in their areas of operation.

However, before the vehicle can even be tested, a comprehensive assessment of the development and safety concept must first be carried out by the manufacturer. In this assessment, the manufacturer must show on paper that all relevant requirements and processes have been complied with and that its testing and approval activities can demonstrate adequate safety levels. Only when all safety-relevant technical aspects of the vehicle and its performance (ODD) have been examined can further system-specific pass criteria be identified based on that examination, in addition to the regulatory performance requirements and national traffic laws.

Because you can’t summon up rain or snow at the touch of a button when you want to test a vehicle’s handling of changing weather conditions, simulations can help. “Of course, simulations like these must first be extensively validated – you need to be able to prove that their results are meaningful and reliable. The current regulations only provide a framework and a comprehensive approach to testing. The actual specific scope of the testing and its location, including test parameters, must be determined based on the vehicle at hand. This multi-pillar principle, consisting of a safety assessment and tests on the test site, in real traffic or in simulation, is state of the art as far as the testing of more highly automated vehicles is concerned,” says Ms. Leicht.

One special focus of the test is on the reaction mechanisms of the vehicles in the event of a fault. After all, if a safety driver can no longer intervene, the vehicle must be able to detect and evaluate technical problems by itself at any time and act accordingly – for example, by making an emergency stop in the event of a system failure. “And of course, this has to happen somewhere safe, not on tram tracks for instance, “Ms. Leicht explains.

For autonomous vehicles to be used in regular operations, every last regulatory question must first be clarified. In addition to type approval for the vehicles, permission is also required for the intended area of use. This is a special feature in German law and completely new for the authorities of the federal states responsible for administering it. The key question is whether this specific type of vehicle is able to cope with all traffic situations in the envisaged area. The legislature has not specified in detail which tests are required for this, Ms. Leicht explains. She and her team are part of the core group in the relevant committees that are developing the draft regulations for this particular field of testing.

For the expert, one thing is certain: before these vehicles can be allowed on the road in regular operation, they will have to prove that they are at least as safe as human drivers. This is also crucial for the future operators of automated buses, be they transport companies or VW's ridesharing subsidiary, Moia. As a rule, these operators will be liable in the event of an accident; in the event of verifiable technical errors, liability will be transferred to the manufacturers.

In the expert’s view, it isn’t possible to reliably predict whether regular operation will become a reality in just two years, as manufacturers and transport companies hope, because proof of vehicle safety will have to be provided before approval for a market launch in Europe. Internationally, however, there are different approaches. It is not possible to say with certainty what level of maturity the vehicles will need to reach to be released onto the roads in other places. That will depend heavily on the individual national regulations. “But I expect that we’ll see further progress in the coming years.”

Be that as it may, the race to get ahead with autonomous driving has picked up speed internationally. Waymo is pushing ahead with its expansion in the USA and is now taking its first step across the pond: by the end of the year, the company plans to bring its self-driving taxi service to London. The Californian company recently presented the next generation of its driving system, which is supposed to be able to cope even better with changing weather conditions and complex traffic situations while also being even more cost-effective than the previous one – a decisive factor for the economic viability of operations.

VW, on the other hand, wants to work with Uber to develop thousands of self-driving IDs in the next few years to bring Buzz to the streets of the USA. Tesla also wants to enter the robotaxi business in a big way, including in Europe. Unlike Waymo and VW, the electric car manufacturer does not use a combination of different sensors and relies exclusively on cameras. This is supposed to save costs, but after eight months of testing in Austin, Texas, it led to a sobering conclusion: Tesla’s vehicles have a higher accident rate than human drivers and are extremely dependent on the weather – when it rains, operations grind to a complete halt. Saving on safety is apparently not worth it.