A decade chasing the autonomous future. Have we finally arrived?

We have invested heavily in autonomous vehicle technology. That is a significant commitment for a European company. In Silicon Valley or Shenzhen, it would barely register. That gap shapes everything: what risks you can take, how long you can afford to be wrong, and how honest you have to be when something is not working.

We had to be very honest.

 

The dream was real. The business case was not.

When we started, the pitch was simple: put autonomous shuttles on the road, remove the driver, make public transport smarter and cheaper. It made sense on a whiteboard. It made sense in a pitch deck. It made sense to the public officials and research programs that funded early deployments.

What it did not make sense as was a business.

The problem was not the technology. Our shuttles worked. People rode them. The problem was that the moment public funding dried up, the service stopped. Every time, without exception. Because the underlying economics were never there.

A bus ticket price caps what you can charge for an autonomous shuttle. No matter how sophisticated the technology, you are still competing with bus fares. And building, operating and maintaining an autonomous system at the safety levels Europe rightly demands costs far more than a bus fare will ever cover.

So we kept going back for more grants. More pilots. More experiments. And so did everyone else in the space. It became a cycle that was hard to break out of, not because of bad intentions, but because the funding structures were not designed with commercial sustainability in mind.

A structural challenge, not a failure of ambition.

I want to be clear: the people and institutions that funded early AV development were right to care about autonomous mobility. The vision was sound. What proved difficult was bridging the gap between a compelling demonstration and a self-sustaining business.

The deeper issue is one the whole industry has had to reckon with. Building autonomous vehicle technology to the standards that actually matter, the safety standards that withstand regulatory scrutiny and the reliability standards that clients will pay for, requires the kind of sustained capital investment that lets you stay the course through years of iteration. That kind of capital is more readily available in some ecosystems than others, and Europe has had to be more resourceful as a result.

We invested heavily over the course of twelve years. That is not a small commitment. But in a global race where some players have access to vastly greater capital, it does sharpen your focus on where to compete and where not to.

The honest question that changed everything.

For years, the conversation in our industry centred on when autonomous vehicles would be everywhere. The harder question, the one that ultimately mattered more, was which markets could actually sustain this technology today, at its current cost, without indefinite subsidy.

The answer, when we finally forced ourselves to face it, was clarifying. Public passenger transport was not ready. Not because autonomy does not work, but because the cost of doing it properly exceeded what that market could bear at this stage. Someone needed to bring those costs down first, in environments that could fund the journey.

That was not a technology failure. It was a market reality. And recognising it was the most valuable thing we did.

Finding the market that actually works.

Once we stopped asking where autonomy could go and started asking where the economics actually closed, the answer became clear.

Industrial environments. Airports. Closed sites with repetitive, predictable operations and clients who measure value not in passenger experience, but in operational uptime.
In a car assembly plant, automating logistics between production lines solves a real, quantifiable problem: driver recruitment for shift work, consistency of throughput, a cleaner transition from operational to capital expenditure. The client does not need autonomy to be inspiring. They need it to be available 99.5% of the time and to never paralyse their production line. That is a market. That is a business case.

So are we there?

The short answer is not yet.

But we’re close. We have a solid base in place. For the first time, the trajectory is clear. With a focused technology roadmap, established industrial partnerships, and a growing base of licences in operational deployments, EasyMile is positioned to accelerate. The job now is to scale what works, instead of searching for what might. That is a different kind of job than before, but it’s a much better one to have.

What I would say to other European leaders in this space.

The hype cycle around autonomous vehicles is over. What comes next is harder and more interesting: figuring out which applications can stand on their own, and building the business models to match.

My advice is simple. Do not let the ambition of the technology drive the choice of market. Let the market drive the application. Find the environment where your solution solves a problem someone will pay to solve, without a pilot programme as the end goal. That is your real market.

Europe has the engineers, the rigour, and the safety culture to build world-class autonomous technology. The next step is pairing that capability with the commercial discipline to point it at markets that can sustain it for the long term.

That discipline is not a retreat from ambition. It is what ambition looks like when it grows up.

By Gilbert Gagnaire

CEO & Founder, EasyMile