Finland has officially joined an EU initiative designed to simplify cross border testing of automated driving systems, and the country is already ahead of the curve in practice. While the political signature came in early June, the real work had started long before that, on a quiet suburban route in Tampere.
A robot bus with no driver on board
Right after midsummer, something quietly historic happened in the Hervanta district of Tampere. Line 301, a small bus built by Remoted, began operating without a safety driver physically present on board. Instead, the vehicle is monitored remotely from a control room, making it the first commercial remotely supervised bus route of its kind.
The bus itself was manufactured in New Zealand, but the software driving it was developed in Tampere. Remoted, the company behind the project, is not trying to build the technology from scratch. Its role is to act as an operator, and by its own admission, it wants to be the best robot vehicle operator in the world.
The regional transport authority Nysse purchases the service directly from Remoted, treating it as a genuine commercial contract rather than a pilot experiment. According to Remoted’s operations manager Arttu Kotilainen, the goal is practical rather than futuristic. Skilled human drivers, he argues, are wasted on short and repetitive feeder routes. Automating that first and last kilometer of a journey could make public transport genuinely competitive with private car ownership.
Europe moves carefully while others race ahead
The contrast with global developments is stark. In Phoenix, Arizona, driverless taxis have been a normal part of daily life for eight years already, courtesy of Waymo, which grew out of a Google backed project and has since expanded into San Francisco and Los Angeles. In China, companies like Pony.ai and Baidu have been running robotaxi trials around Beijing and Shanghai.
Europe, with its traditionally high baseline for road safety, has taken a more cautious approach. But the European Commission wants that caution paired with progress, not stagnation. As part of the broader action plan for the European automotive industry, a project launched a year ago aims to create harmonized, cross border approval procedures for testing automated driving systems across EU member states.
What comes next for regulation
Kirsi Miettinen, a legislative counsellor at Finland’s Ministry of Transport and Communications, tracks this regulatory landscape closely. She expects that early next year, the UN Economic Commission for Europe will finalize technical vehicle regulation covering automated driving systems. That framework, once in place, should allow EU type approved automated vehicles to appear on public roads by around 2028.
Miettinen describes international vehicle regulation as the decisive factor enabling this shift at scale. Without it, she notes, automated vehicles simply could not reach the roads in any meaningful volume.
Finland’s regulator, Traficom, has been directly involved in shaping this regulation through both UNECE and EU working groups, and it earns praise from industry players for how it has handled the process. Kotilainen credits Traficom with turning what is often described as Finland’s excessive regulatory culture into a genuine competitive advantage, working dynamically with companies, helping secure permits, and refining processes along the way. In his view, Finland now sits at the global forefront of both licensing and automated driving.
A growing club, and more projects in the pipeline
The EU declaration on automated road transport now counts 13 full member states, including Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, and now Finland, which had previously held observer status.
Beyond the Tampere bus line, Finland has several other automation projects underway. Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences has secured a testing permit for the RovesUGV project, focused on autonomous logistics solutions. Meanwhile, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland continues to test automated vehicles both in closed environments and on public roads.
The message from Finnish officials and companies alike is consistent: what looks like heavy bureaucracy from the outside has, in this case, become the very thing accelerating the country’s path toward a driverless future.
