- The Chinese autonomous-driving company has secured regulatory approval to test its driverless delivery vans on Belgian roads
- A new experience center at the Port of Antwerp-Bruges will provide a permanent real-world testing ground for logistics operators
Zelos, a Chinese autonomous driving startup, has secured Belgium’s Y Test Plate, becoming the first robovan company to receive the vehicle testing license in Europe and opening the way for its L4 driverless logistics technology to enter one of the region’s major freight hubs.
The Y Test Plate is part of Belgium’s official vehicle-testing system. With the license, Zelos’ robovan has been brought into the country’s regulatory testing framework and can conduct road tests and technical validation with authorization from local authorities.
The Suzhou-based manufacturer of self-driving delivery vans is also working with the Port of Antwerp-Bruges to establish a driverless vehicle experience center, which has now opened to logistics operators and other port stakeholders.
A chance for evaluation
The center will remain open on a long-term basis, with robovans operating regularly along the port’s K102 route.
The setup gives potential customers and industry partners a chance to evaluate the vehicles in a live logistics environment rather than through controlled demonstrations.
“Moving autonomous-driving technology from one-off demonstrations to sustained real-world operations is an important step toward large-scale deployment,” said Liu Zhengzhao (刘正钊), general manager of Zelos’ European operations.
Officials from the Belgian government and regulators attended the launch, along with delegations from the Port of Rotterdam, the Port of Algeciras and the Port of Amsterdam.
Building a European test bed
Zelos said its European expansion is supported by what it calls a “Zelos Brain,” built in-house around its proprietary APEX multimodal foundation model.
The model is being scaled from tens of billions toward hundreds of billions of parameters and is continuously trained on a computing cluster with nearly 15,000 GPUs.
The company has also expanded its overseas operations beyond Europe. In Singapore, Zelos previously secured what it described as the country’s first license for an unmanned logistics vehicle.
It also obtained the country’s first commercial operating license for autonomous freight vehicles.
A regulatory foothold
In the Middle East, it has signed a joint-venture agreement with Emirates Post Group, while in Europe it has been moving across several markets from technology validation toward commercial pilots.
Zelos said more than 30,000 of its robovans are now actively operating worldwide, with cumulative mileage exceeding 270 million kilometers across more than 20 countries and 300 cities.
The Belgian approval gives Zelos a regulatory foothold in Europe, while the port experience center provides a controlled but commercially relevant environment for collecting local operating and safety data.
The next test will be whether that combination can turn autonomous delivery vehicles from pilot projects into sustained logistics operations across the region.
Header image credit: Zelos
