- China’s autonomous driving startup wins Germany’s nationwide L4 testing approval, boosting shares
- With Uber partnership and mass-production data behind it, Momenta seeks to turn robotaxi into a real business
Just three weeks after entering Hong Kong’s stock market as the “first physical AI stock,” autonomous driving startup Momenta has delivered a fresh catalyst for investors: a major regulatory breakthrough in Europe.
On July 29, Momenta announced that it had received Level 4 autonomous driving testing approval from Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority (Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt, KBA), allowing it to conduct L4 autonomous vehicle tests on urban roads across Germany.
The approval marks the first time a Chinese company has obtained nationwide L4 testing authorization covering German city roads.
The announcement immediately lifted investor sentiment, with Momenta’s shares rising more than 10% during trading on July 29.
The significance of the German approval lies in its nationwide scope. KBA is one of the world’s most stringent automotive regulators, and approvals for advanced autonomous driving testing in Germany have historically been dominated by domestic automakers and major automotive suppliers.
Unlike city-by-city applications, Momenta’s authorization provides a broader testing pathway, allowing the company to deploy vehicles across Germany under a single regulatory approval framework.
For a company seeking to expand robotaxi operations across multiple global markets, such regulatory efficiency could save substantial time and deployment costs.
From tech supplier to robotaxi operator
The regulatory milestone is only one piece of Momenta’s broader robotaxi strategy. The company’s strongest commercial signal comes from its partnership with Uber.
In 2025, Momenta and Uber announced a strategic agreement to integrate autonomous vehicles into Uber’s platform, with Germany’s Munich selected as the initial European launch city.
The two companies plan to begin L4 autonomous vehicle testing in Munich in 2026, with the goal of expanding to other European cities.
The partnership represents more than a conventional supplier relationship. Uber contributes one of the world’s largest ride-hailing networks, customer demand and fleet operation capabilities, while Momenta provides autonomous driving technology and vehicle integration expertise.
For Uber, which has largely shifted away from developing its own autonomous driving technology, partnerships with autonomous vehicle companies offer a way to participate in the robotaxi market without bearing the entire technology burden.
For Momenta, access to Uber’s global mobility network could become a shortcut from testing fleets to commercial deployment.
The relationship has also extended into capital markets. Uber has invested in Momenta through its wholly owned investment vehicle, making it both a business partner and shareholder.
The ‘two-legged strategy’
Unlike some robotaxi startups that rely almost entirely on dedicated autonomous fleets, Momenta has built its strategy around two parallel tracks: mass-production assisted driving and fully autonomous mobility.
The company’s domestic robotaxi program is also moving toward commercialization.
In China, Momenta is working with SAIC Motor and its mobility platform Xiangdao Chuxing on a mass-production robotaxi project, with vehicles equipped with Momenta’s L4 autonomous driving system expected to debut in 2027.
This approach gives Momenta a key advantage: robotaxi development is not starting from zero.
The company says more than 1 million production vehicles worldwide have been equipped with Momenta’s intelligent driving solutions, covering nine of the world’s top 10 automakers, with more than 210 vehicle models selected for production projects.
The accumulated real-world driving data and engineering experience provide the foundation for its autonomous driving models. Momenta’s R7 World Model, for example, has been trained using more than 12 billion kilometers of driving data.
This “mass production first, robotaxi second” route is different from companies that pursue autonomous taxis purely through expensive fleet expansion.
It allows Momenta to combine commercial vehicle deployment, data accumulation and algorithm iteration into a single development loop.
Commercialization remains the real test
Germany’s L4 approval, Uber partnership, mass-production foundation and recent domestic testing progress together have pushed Momenta’s robotaxi narrative from a technology demonstration toward a more tangible commercialization phase.
But investors still need to separate regulatory milestones from business reality.
Robotaxi remains a capital-intensive business with a long path to profitability. Obtaining permission to test autonomous vehicles is only the entry ticket.
Building a commercially viable operation requires solving far more difficult questions: fleet scale, vehicle utilization, maintenance costs, insurance, regulation and performance in unpredictable real-world environments.
Momenta’s robotaxi business has yet to generate meaningful revenue. In its IPO prospectus, robotaxi-related revenue remained effectively zero, highlighting the gap between technological capability and commercial maturity.
The reason capital markets are willing to give Momenta a premium valuation is not because robotaxi has already become a profitable business, but because the company appears to have built a more sustainable path than a pure technology bet.
With more than one million production vehicles generating data, partnerships with global automakers, and Uber providing a potential global distribution channel, Momenta is attempting to prove a bigger thesis: that autonomous driving companies can move beyond endless testing and build a scalable mobility business.
The next challenge is no longer proving that autonomous cars can drive themselves. It is proving they can make money.
