Uber and Wayve launched London’s first robotaxi service on Thursday, deploying a small fleet of Ford Mustang Mach-Es across the city. The service represents a significant milestone for autonomous vehicle technology in the UK capital, though it comes with a crucial caveat: every vehicle has a licensed human driver behind the wheel who remains legally responsible for the car and can take over at any moment. Uber operates and owns the vehicles while Wayve, a British company founded in Cambridge, provides the underlying driving software. The fleet is deliberately limited to fewer than 20 cars, with Transport for London approving up to 15 vehicles for a one-year trial when permissions were granted in August.
The regulatory framework shapes everything about this deployment. TfL licensed the modified Wayve vehicles as private hire vehicles rather than automated vehicles, which legally requires a licensed PHV driver to be aboard and responsible throughout every journey. Removing that person would require an entirely different permission—an Automated Passenger Services permit issued through the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency under the Automated Vehicles Act—a process neither company has completed. Uber’s head of autonomous mobility, Sarfraz Maredia, confirmed the fleet will grow over time but declined to put a date on full driverless operation, stating only that „that process is still playing out.” Riders cannot specifically request a robotaxi; they are simply matched with one and can decline the trip. Fares remain identical to standard Uber rates, and the app skips the tipping prompt.
For Wayve, the London deployment serves as a proving ground for its distinctive approach. The company trains an end-to-end driving model rather than mapping cities in advance and has spent the past year building out the compute infrastructure behind that system, attracting investment from AMD, Arm and Qualcomm alongside a Series D round raised to scale the technology. London presents a particularly harsh testing environment—narrow streets, cyclists, bus lanes, roadworks and a road layout that predates cars make it far more challenging than the wide American grids where robotaxis learned to drive. The supervised nature of the trial also caps what it can demonstrate economically: a car with a paid driver costs roughly what a normal minicab costs to run, meaning the cost advantages that make autonomy attractive remain unproven.
Being first in London carries symbolic weight in an increasingly crowded race. Waymo has been preparing a London service and Baidu is doing the same, making a supervised launch a way of banking the milestone before either competitor arrives. However, the comparison on capability is not flattering—Waymo runs fully driverless services in 14 American cities, placing Uber’s London launch a generation behind its main rival. This pattern repeats across Uber’s European expansion: its first continental robotaxi service opened in Zagreb last month, also with safety drivers, and its Tokyo pilot with Wayve and Nissan follows the same supervised model. Until the DVSA permit arrives, London’s robotaxi service remains essentially a driver-assistance system with a very sophisticated assistant—a reminder that robotaxis have generally been scaling faster than the problems that scaling creates get solved.
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Forrás: https://thenextweb.com/news/uber-wayve-london-robotaxi-launch-safety-driver.