Would total autonomy stop at the socket? Charging without a driver requires rethinking infrastructure. A battle that Europe can win.
From Hong Kong, where I live, the future of mobilities is not a projection: it is a daily reality. A few hours from here, robotaxis are already circulating in defined areas of Shenzhen and Hangzhou. On the other side of the Pacific, Waymo has exceeded twenty million autonomous journeys. Meanwhile, from France where I chose to develop our business, I measure the gap that is widening every day. The autonomous vehicle is no longer a futuristic promise: it is a wave that is breaking, and Europe is watching it come.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have changed the game. Deploying autonomous vehicles on a large scale, in cities and rural areas, is becoming technically accessible and economically credible. What yesterday was a confidential prototype is becoming industrialized. And this acceleration has everything of a tsunami: silent from afar, irresistible up close.
A delay, but not inevitable
Thomas Matagne, founder of Ecov, wrote lucidly in a recent note: without a rapid reaction, Europe risks becoming a “digital colony”, dependent on foreign technologies to move its citizens and exploit their mobility data. I completely agree with this observation. His position encourages me to express myself in turn, because I believe that it is time to form a real European team of autonomous vehicle players.
Let’s be lucid without being defeatist: Europe will probably not dominate all layers of autonomous driving – the algorithms, the chips, the models, where American and Chinese players have taken a considerable lead. But it has a decisive advantage: mastery of complex transport systems and the infrastructures that make them operate on a large scale. It is there, and not in a losing race for embedded software, that European mobility sovereignty will be at stake.
The forgotten link: energy
Because the entire debate focuses on driving – sensors, AI, regulations – and forgets the obvious physical fact: an autonomous vehicle remains an electric vehicle. You have to recharge it. And there arises a question that no one asks: who will connect the cable, if there is no more conductor?
Total autonomy cannot stop at the electrical outlet. A robotaxi that has to wait for a human hand to come and connect it is not truly autonomous. Automatic recharging – without cable, without human intervention – is not a comfort: it is a condition of real autonomy. It is precisely this reasoning that has guided our product strategy at EVIAS.
Freight, an obvious area
Nowhere is this logic more striking than in road freight transport. Imagine autonomous heavy goods vehicles traveling on highways, day and night, with no regulated driving time to respect. What sense would there be in forcing them to stop in an area to recharge, or to carry gigantic batteries to the detriment of their payload?
The answer can be summed up in two words: an electrified road. An infrastructure that recharges vehicles while they are driving, continuously, without stopping and without oversizing. This is the condition for autonomous freight to keep its promises of productivity and sobriety.
Europe has a card to play
The autonomous vehicle is not just a driving algorithm. It is a complete system – mobility, energy, infrastructure, data – and it is precisely in the control of systems that Europe excels. Energy and recharging are a key element, too often forgotten. Making it an area of sovereignty means ensuring that the autonomous revolution becomes an opportunity for our territories rather than another dependency.
In Europe, there are already players working on these infrastructure building blocks. Our modular and replicable automatic ground charging solution is intended to be one of these important pieces of the puzzle for autonomous fleets and freight — not the only answer, but a strategic link that has been neglected for too long. All that remains is to bring these players together, to finance them, and to have a collective ambition. The window is narrow. But there is still time for Europe to fight the battle it can win.
