17:00 13-07-2026

Marti and Tensor Team Up: Robotaxis Are Coming to Turkish Cities

Turkish mobility super app Marti will purchase and deploy Tensor's Level 4 autonomous vehicles across its ride-hailing network in Türkiye.

Marti wants to do for Türkiye what Waymo and Baidu are already testing in more mature markets: turn the self-driving car from a tech demo into an ordinary ride booked through an app. The Turkish mobility platform has signed a multi-year agreement with Tensor to purchase and deploy autonomous vehicles in cities across the country.

Marti isn't starting from a lab bench — it already has a real operating base. Its ride-hailing service runs in 20 cities across Türkiye, including Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Bursa, Antalya, Konya and Adana. The company puts its all-time user count at around 7.8 million, and once the rollout begins, riders will be able to hail an autonomous Tensor Robocar directly from the Marti app.

Tensor is betting on a Level 4 Robocar — not just a prototype confined to a test zone, but a vehicle designed from the ground up for both private ownership and fleet operation. It runs on an in-house compute stack built around 8 NVIDIA Thor-X GPUs, a full sensor suite, sensor-cleaning systems and deep OTA updates that reach down to the firmware level. For a robotaxi, that's not a minor detail: dirty cameras, lidar units, overheating compute hardware and fleet downtime tend to matter more than polished promises about “self-driving.”

But the real obstacle isn't the technology — it's operations. Turkish cities are a demanding environment: dense traffic, motorbikes, pedestrians, tourist districts, heat, rain and wildly varying driving discipline. Even Level 4 requires a clearly defined operating zone, licensing rules, insurance, remote monitoring and a clear line of liability in a crash. That's why the release is carefully hedged — timelines, scale and regulatory approval are framed as forecasts, not guarantees.

Robotaxis tend to launch fastest where there's already a large city-scale service with a customer base, drivers, support staff and operational infrastructure in place. Without that, even a capable self-driving car stays an expensive experiment. For riders, the question will come down to something simple: price, safety, wait time, and whether they're willing to trust the route to an algorithm.

Autonomous cars in Türkiye won't start in a private garage — they'll start with a “hail” button in an app. That's how self-driving vehicles go mainstream: by surviving the city, not just the press release.