June 29 (SeeNews) - Croatian technology company Project 3 Mobility (‘P3M') will start building soon a factory for robo-taxi vehicles under a 535 million euro ($584 million) project co-financed the European Union, P3M CEO Marko Pejkovic said.
“In the next few months we will start building a factory, for which we already have the design, for a serial production of autonomous electric vehicles in Croatia,” Pejkovic said, as seen in a video recording published on the government's website on Wednesday.
In May, the European Commission said it will grant 179.5 million euro for the project for an urban mobility service based on a fully autonomous electric vehicle under its Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). The rest of the overall cost of the project will be covered by P3M, an affiliate of Croatia's Rimac technology group.
The project includes research, development and production of fully autonomous electric vehicles, supporting infrastructure and a software platform. It is part of a wider urban mobility project to be deployed in the Croatian capital Zagreb.
The 179.5 million euro grant is the highest ever for a single research and development project approved by the European Commission, Croatia's prime minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Wednesday during a ceremony to sign the grant agreement.
He added that this is a pioneer project in Europe, which combines the green transition, the digital transformation, R&D and has a social component because disabled people will be able to use the robo-taxi vehicles for free. Plenkovic also said that Croatia will be the first country to amend its legislation with regard to this new self-driving technology and he believes that the project will be launched in 2026.
Croatian businessman Mate Rimac, his Rimac Group, and South Korea's Kia Corporation are among the owners of P3M, according to data from the Croatian court registry.
($ = 0.916 euro)