BERLIN - Bolt, the Estonian ride-hailing company, said on Wednesday that it had chosen Nvidia's Alpamayo Stack software to drive the Lucid vehicles in its planned European robotaxi service, and that the program would begin on the roads of Madrid in 2027.
The announcement, made at Nvidia's GTC conference in Berlin, names the driving software that was missing from the deal Bolt and Lucid announced in September, when the companies said they would build a Level 4 platform for Europe and that Bolt aimed to own and run at least 25,000 Lucid vehicles. Those vehicles will be built on Nvidia's Hyperion computer and sensor platform, the companies said.
The Madrid program will start by gathering real-world driving data to develop and validate the technology, subject to regulatory approval, Bolt said. The company told Reuters it expects "tens of vehicles" on the streets of the Spanish capital next year. Bolt named Germany and France as key markets for later deployment, and the project is part of a wider goal of putting 100,000 autonomous vehicles on its platform across Europe and the wider UNECE region by 2035.
"The Region of Madrid is pioneering a structured framework for commercial autonomous mobility in coordination with national authorities," Jevgeni Kabanov, Bolt's president and head of autonomous driving, said in the company's statement. He told Reuters that Madrid was picked as the pilot city because the regional government had created a permit that allows limited commercial operations before full approval, and that the driving software runs entirely inside the car without connecting to the internet, for cybersecurity reasons.
Bolt and Nvidia said they would adapt the software for European roads and fit it to vehicles from several manufacturers, starting with Lucid. Nvidia describes Alpamayo Stack as full-stack driving software that combines reasoning AI with classical perception and planning, with its Halos safety system running alongside. Bolt said its own autonomous driving unit would develop and sell the ride-hailing service and run the fleets.
The company said the Lucid program sits alongside its separate autonomous work with Pony.ai and Stellantis, and follows what it called its first autonomous mobility launch, in Luxembourg.
Madrid is quickly becoming a crowded test market. Spain's traffic authority in September gave Uber, WeRide and the fleet operator AVOMO the country's first national permit for Level 4 passenger vehicles, covering 20 WeRide cars in the region, and Alphabet's Waymo said on Tuesday that it planned to launch fully driverless rides there in 2027.
Bolt did not say how many cars would carry passengers in Madrid, whether a safety driver would be aboard, or when riders would be able to book a trip.