After a ten-year period of trial and error, officials approved fully autonomous buses for operation in Norway, where they’ll soon mix in with human drivers on public roads. Unlike other autonomous bus initiatives around the world, there will be no human driver behind the wheel whatsoever.

The approval, first reported by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), applies to buses operated by Vy, a national state-owned transit company, as well as Kolumbus, the regional transit authority for the Southwest county of Rogaland.

Autonomous buses — known as “buses without hands on the wheel” in Norway — have been zipping around Rogaland since 2022, but they’ve always had a driver behind the wheel to monitor the vehicles and step in when needed, per NRK.

That the safety monitor is being removed is a massive step for autonomous vehicles in Europe.

The approved buses are built by Karsan, a Turkish bus manufacturer. Their e-ATAK model bus is designed to provide a zero-emission electric bus with a 52 passenger capacity, with level four autonomous driving capability supplied by the company Adastec.

The decision by Norwegian officials to let a level four autonomous bus roam around city streets is telling. In the scale of self-driving cars, level four refers to “high driving automation,” a system which doesn’t require human interaction in most cases. It’s still a notch below level five, or “full driving automation,” the point at which cars can do anything a human driver might do without any intervention at all.

Still, there are limits to the range of Norway’s new self-driving bus. Assuming it passes a conditional pilot, the e-ATAK buses will start rolling out in May, where they’ll largely stick to a loop encompassing a local hospital and a university, NRK reports.

While anything could happen over the pilot period, the buses are expected to pass, which could make Norway the first country in Europe to officially deploy fully driverless buses on public roads alongside regular traffic.

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