Autonomous vehicles in Europe: one law, twenty-seven realities

Europe has a common regulatory framework for fully automated vehicles for some time now. But in 2026, having common rules for approving AVs still does not mean having a single European market for operating them. Europe has harmonised much of the vehicle approval framework, but its 27 Member States still govern real-world deployment in different ways. Understanding this gap is the starting point for talking about public transport, demand-responsive transport (DRT), or robotaxis.

Context

The topic is often reduced to the privately owned car that drives itself. The European reality is broader: it also covers shared shuttles, automated bus lines, and shared mobility services. This is exactly the ground that this series of articles will explore.

Before going further, we need to establish a simple framework: who decides what when it comes to putting a driverless vehicle on European roads?

The European regulatory foundation

The European Union has built a common foundation since 2019. Two texts structure the whole:

• a general safety regulation, setting the core safety principles for all vehicles
• an implementing regulation for fully automated vehicles, voted in 2022, defining procedures and technical requirements they must meet for EU type-approval.

In practice, four years after this text came into force, no vehicle has yet received this European type-approval. The bottleneck isn't the text itself, but its application: companies and testing bodies are still struggling to complete a first full file. That gap sums up well the distance between the ambition on paper and the reality on the ground.

This European type-approval is reserved for a specific case: a manufacturer looking to sell a mass-production model across the entire EU. That is why the numerous pilot shuttles already running in Europe do not wait for it; they use a different route: a national exemption granted on a project-by-project basis, which is faster but valid only in the issuing country.

The EU/national paradox

Here is the most important point to remember, and often the most misunderstood: type-approving a vehicle is not enough to put it on the road.

European type-approval covers the machine: its sensors, its software, its ability to react. But putting that vehicle on a specific road, in a specific city, remains a national, sometimes even local decision. It's each country's own authority that grants the operating licence: which zone, what speed, what level of remote human supervision.

A vehicle type-approved at European level will therefore still have to comply with different operating rules depending on whether it runs in Berlin, Madrid, or Rennes. Taavi Rõivas, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the European Connected Automated Driving (CAD) platform, sums up the situation: the European Union has, in theory, a single set of rules, but in practice ends up with "twenty-seven different regulations"

For a public transport operator or a mobility software provider, this distinction isn't a legal footnote. It's the question to ask before any deployment: is the vehicle type-approved, and is its operation authorised locally? The two answers don’t come from the same place.

Key learning

Three ideas to take from this overview:

• A European type-approval framework exists, but translating it into scalable real-world deployment remains complex.
• Real-world operation plays out at national level, which explains why some countries move fast while others stay at the experimentation stage.
• Public transport and DRT are just as concerned as the individual robotaxi, even if they get less attention in the headlines.

This national diversity is exactly what the next article in this series will unpack, through three very different trajectories: Germany, which has already set a precise timeline; Spain, still at the draft-decree stage; and France, true to its cautious, experimentation-led approach.