Switzerland launches first public robotaxi service in Zurich valley

On a Tuesday afternoon in the Furttal valley, north of Zurich, a passenger opens an app called Iamo, selects a pickup point from a map, and waits at one of roughly a hundred designated stops scattered across four small municipalities. Within minutes, an electric car arrives—no driver visible behind the wheel, or so it appears. A safety operator sits ready to take control if needed, but for now the vehicle navigates the ordinary streets of Boppelsen, Dänikon, Hüttikon, and Otelfingen on its own. This is Switzerland's first robotaxi service open to the public, and it represents the country's cautious entry into a technology that has already reshaped transportation in other parts of the world.

Three autonomous vehicles make up the fleet. Each can carry up to three passengers. The service runs daily from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., and the pricing is straightforward: a base fare of 4.70 Swiss francs plus 38 centimes per kilometre. A ten-kilometre journey costs roughly 8.50 francs—a fraction of what a conventional Zurich taxi would charge for the same distance, which hovers around 44 francs. The economics are compelling, though for now the service operates as a pilot program, separate from Switzerland's integrated public-transport fare system. Passengers cannot use their standard GA or Half-Fare travel cards; they must book through the Iamo app, available on both iOS and Android, after registering their details.

The choice of location was deliberate. Furttal is a suburban area with lower population density than central Zurich, and project organizers believed autonomous vehicles might prove especially valuable in such places—filling gaps in conventional transit where demand doesn't justify frequent bus or train service. The valley also has a regional railway line, which creates an opportunity to test how robotaxis might integrate with existing public transport rather than simply replace it. The project is a collaboration between Swiss Transit Lab, the cantons of Zurich and Aargau, and Swiss Federal Railways, representing a coordinated push by both regional government and the national rail operator.

The path to this launch was methodical. Testing began in the summer of 2025, when the team mapped the service area in detail. By November 2025, Switzerland's Federal Roads Office—Astra—had granted authorization for automated driving trials. The subsequent months of testing proceeded without significant incident. Yet the vehicles operating today are not fully autonomous. A trained safety driver occupies the driver's seat, ready to intervene. The front passenger seat remains empty, a deliberate choice to keep the vehicle's attention focused forward. This reflects Switzerland's regulatory approach: introduce the technology gradually, learn from real-world operation, and only move toward full autonomy once confidence builds.

Pascal Kern, who heads Zurich's Office for Mobility, has stated that authorities intend to roll out autonomous transport incrementally. The next phase, pending further approval from Astra, would introduce automated minibuses capable of operating without anyone behind the wheel. Instead of a safety driver, trained staff would monitor these vehicles remotely from a control center. This represents a meaningful step toward true driverless operation, but it is not yet here.

The timing of Switzerland's entry into robotaxi service underscores how far behind the country has fallen. In China, Apollo Go operates large fleets of fully driverless taxis across multiple cities, handling millions of rides on urban networks and motorways with no human operator on board. In the United States, Waymo has similarly scaled beyond the experimental phase, running commercial robotaxi services in several cities with hundreds of vehicles and millions of completed journeys. Both companies learned by testing at scale, accumulating real-world data that informed rapid iteration and improvement. European regulators and automakers, by contrast, moved more cautiously—prioritizing safety validation and legal clarity over speed to market. The result is a widening gap. While Iamo carries three passengers between designated stops in a rural valley, Waymo and Apollo Go are already routine parts of urban transportation in their respective countries, operating on a scale and with a degree of autonomy that Switzerland is only now beginning to test.