This Saturday morning I indulged in one of my favourite moments: reading several newspapers worldwide to try and shape my own views on geopolitics, economics, technology, and more.
On the Wall Street Journal I read with interest this article: “It’s Waymo’s World. We’re All Just Riding in It“. It describes how automated vehicles are progressing in the U.S: there is a fierce competition particularly on “Robotaxis” and Waymo – Google’s driverless-taxi company – just celebrated 10 million rides. The article says “most companies that tried to beat Waymo have given up. Uber and Lyft ditched their efforts to develop self-driving cars. General Motors scrapped its Cruise robotaxi program. Amazon has Zoox, but Waymo’s most formidable rival in America at this point appears to be Tesla“.
On the other side of the world, China, we have WeRide. Reading the “about” section on their website, we find it was founded in 2017 to develop autonomous driving technologies from Level 2 to Level 4. Its autonomous vehicles have been tested or operated in over 30 cities across 10 countries. It is also the first and only technology company whose products have received autonomous driving permits in five markets: China, the UAE, Singapore, France, and the US. WeRide has been operating its self-driving fleet for over 2,000 days.
In this market we don’t find any European company. The little available is Level 2 automation on some luxury models of Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz but, as we know, apart from keeping the right lane on motorways and doing some easy parking, there is not much more motion/action to mention.
While thinking of the other buzzword, Artificial Intelligence, on the online magazine TechCrunch I have read “Google’s Gemini AI app has 400M monthly active users“. The article states: “While OpenAI and Google have the most widely used AI chatbot apps, Meta is trying to break into the space as well. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said Meta’s AI products have more than a billion monthly active users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and it recently launched an AI chatbot app to compete with ChatGPT and Gemini” .
Again, we don’t see any European footprint here, just a handful of solo attempts of some companies in some countries, but nothing that could become a real best-selling product.
Last 22nd May 2025 I had the chance of attending the 25th edition of the “Brussels Economic Forum“. It was a very well organised and topics-rich event. Excellent speakers debated the economic situation in Europe from many points of view. What resulted at the end of the day was the frightening lack of innovation in the Europe. While the focus was more on the EU, we cannot say that in other countries – such as the UK – the situation is better.
On the British newspapers we constantly read about cutting costs in every sector, increasing taxes, removing the non-dom status to highly rich people who are non domiciled in the UK. This has triggered immediate actions: a number of super rich people started planning to leave the UK, as recently published by City a.m..
Apart from these intentions, I cannot see great effort in promoting innovation in the UK either.
Probably, it was true what described in one Economist’s article in 2012 “The world’s shifting centre of gravity“: the economic shift from the 20th to the 21st century was said to happen from the West of Europe to Asia. Thirteen years later, we could see this concept proved correct.
Stefano Mainero
EPN Consulting and EPN Consulting Research and Innovation Founder & CEO
Article written by human beings without any use of AI. EPN Consulting Ltd. copyright 2025
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