Bolt founder and chief executive Markus Villig has announced plans to deploy a fleet of 25,000 autonomous vehicles across Europe, built in partnership with electric car manufacturer Lucid Motors.

Bolt will both own and operate the fleet directly, rather than relying on third-party drivers. The vehicles will be co-designed with Lucid Motors on NVIDIA’s Hyperion platform, drawing on Bolt’s operational data and more than a decade of ride-hailing experience to meet European safety standards and scale efficiently.

The announcement carries some local colour for Malta. Bolt has been the island’s dominant ride-hailing platform since it launched there in 2018, making it one of the more recognisable names in the country’s transport landscape. For context, the only autonomous vehicles currently operating on Maltese roads are a fleet of Malta Public Transport buses introduced as part of a pilot earlier this year.

On the wider European rollout, Villig pointed to the higher regulatory and quality bar that autonomous vehicles must clear in the EU, describing the fleet as being designed specifically around those requirements. The co-design arrangement with Lucid covers both the vehicle hardware and the software stack, with cost-per-kilometre efficiency sitting alongside safety and scaling speed as the stated priorities.

The move signals a meaningful shift in Bolt’s ambitions. Rather than remaining a platform connecting passengers with independent drivers, the company appears to be positioning itself as a vertically integrated mobility operator, owning the vehicles, the software and the service layer all at once. Whether that model proves commercially viable at the scale Villig is describing will be the question European markets are likely to watch closely.