Waymo picks Munich for its first continental Europe robotaxi push
Alphabet's Waymo said Tuesday it will bring its robotaxis to Munich, its first continental European city, with commercial rides targeted for the end of 2027 pending regulatory approval. The company set up a German entity months ago and is now working with Germany's Federal Motor Transport Authority and local officials to clear the path to a public launch.
The sequencing is deliberately cautious. Waymo starts by mapping the city and running supervised tests with employees, media, and invited guests before opening a limited service, then full public rides once regulators sign off. Notably, Waymo currently holds no German testing permits — the country's framework, the EU's first legal basis for fully driverless (Level 4) driving, has mostly issued Level 3 conditional permits to outfits like Mobileye, Volkswagen, Wayve, and Autobrains.
Munich puts Waymo on a collision course in Europe: Uber and Pony.ai plan more than 2,000 robotaxis across the continent, Baidu is testing in London with Lyft, and Waymo itself plans a London commercial launch that will be its real European debut. Our view — Germany's strict but explicit approval regime could become Waymo's best reference customer for the rest of the EU; if KBA approval goes smoothly, expect other European capitals to line up fast.
We covered Waymo's US expansion pace earlier this month in Waymo's fleet hits 4,000 as recalls and edge cases mount.
Unsloth is racing to ship day-0 support for Qwen 3.8 Flash Next, the unreleased follow-up to the local-AI community's favorite 27B model. In an AMA on r/LocalLLaMA, team members confirmed they are "hopefully" targeting day-zero support for the new architecture, though they cautioned it is not guaranteed — the architecture is new enough that mainline llama.cpp could lag behind their own runtime at release.
Leaked specs circulating in the same threads describe a redesigned multimodal mixture-of-experts model: roughly 125B main parameters plus about 51B of N-gram embedding parameters, with only around 6B active per token — an efficient design similar to DeepSeek's Engram and Meta's Longcat Flash approaches. The practical stakes are simple: if day-0 lands, local users get quantized builds that run from day one instead of waiting weeks for tooling to catch up, which is exactly what happened with earlier Qwen Next releases.
What to watch: whether Alibaba confirms the reported August 27 release date — and whether Unsloth's day-0 promise holds against mainline llama.cpp merge delays.
Will you upgrade your local setup on day one — or wait for the community benchmarks? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: TechCrunch ·
Waymo blog · Techmeme · r/LocalLLaMA discussion · BigGo Finance
