Bolt has chosen Nvidia’s Alpamayo Stack to drive its European robotaxi fleet, starting in Madrid in 2027 with Lucid vehicles. The announcement came a day after Waymo named Madrid for its own 2027 launch, which makes the Spanish capital one of Europe’s first robotaxi battlegrounds. The programme is the foundation for a rollout of at … Continued
Bolt has chosen Nvidia’s Alpamayo Stack to drive its European robotaxi fleet, starting in Madrid in 2027 with Lucid vehicles. The announcement came a day after Waymo named Madrid for its own 2027 launch, which makes the Spanish capital one of Europe’s first robotaxi battlegrounds.
The programme is the foundation for a rollout of at least 25,000 Level 4-ready Lucid vehicles built on Nvidia’s Hyperion compute and sensor architecture. Alpamayo combines reasoning AI with classical perception and planning, backed by Nvidia’s Halos safety system. In Madrid, the programme will begin by gathering real-world driving data, subject to regulatory approval, and Germany and France are the key markets after that.
The deal is part of Bolt’s plan to put 100,000 autonomous vehicles on its platform across Europe and the wider UNECE region by 2035. Bolt has already launched autonomous mobility in Luxembourg and is also working with Pony.ai and Stellantis.
“Our ambition isn’t to bring autonomous driving to just a handful of cities. We want to make autonomous ride-hailing available at scale across Europe, with 100,000 vehicles on our platform by 2035,” said Jevgeni Kabanov, President and Head of Autonomous Driving at Bolt.
Bolt’s model is the mirror image of Waymo’s. Bolt brings the platform and the fleet and buys in the driving software, while Waymo builds its own Driver and hands fleet operations to partners such as Element in Toronto. In Madrid, though, Waymo aims to carry riders in 2027, while Bolt’s first step is data collection, which gives Waymo a head start.
Why this matters:
- Madrid becomes mainland Europe’s robotaxi test bed. With Waymo and Bolt both targeting 2027, the Madrid region’s structured framework for commercial autonomous mobility appears to be drawing first movers, which could make it an early benchmark for European deployment.
- Nvidia moves up to full-stack software. Supplying driving software as well as compute and sensor architecture takes Nvidia into direct competition with AV developers, and a common Hyperion foundation could lower the barrier for platforms to field robotaxis without in-house stacks.
- European terms, foreign technology. Bolt’s pitch of autonomy “on European terms” rests on US and Chinese partners, including Nvidia, Lucid and Pony.ai, which contrasts with EU ambitions for a sovereign European driving stack.
