Something slightly historic happened in London this week and it was easy to miss between the jobs rows. Uber became the first company to run self-driving minicabs in the UK, with a small fleet of electric Ford Mustangs fitted with technology from the British firm Wayve. The BBC’s technology editor was the first journalist to hail one, and her ride home was mostly smooth apart from one moment when the safety driver took over.
That detail is the whole story, really. All 15 of the licensed vehicles must carry a human safety driver behind the wheel, ready to grab control if anything goes wrong. So this is not the driverless future arriving in Earls Court. It is the driverless future doing its apprenticeship, at taxi rates, while everyone watches to see who blinks. Uber says it asked London customers in the app whether they would take a robotaxi and more than 100,000 said yes, which is either quiet enthusiasm or a very large sample of people who like gadgets.
The interesting part for anyone following UK tech policy is Wayve itself. The company’s approach is not to pre-programme the cars. Its system reads the road through sensors in a bar on the roof and decides what to do in the moment, the way a person would. Wayve chief executive Alex Kendall has framed the competition in exactly those terms, and the competition is fierce. Alphabet’s Waymo and China’s Baidu both want to launch services here, and the UK has positioned its Automated Vehicles Act as the friendliest rulebook in Europe for getting them on the road.
Which brings us to the unanswered question. The regulatory framework is in place, the companies are queuing, and the first service is now running with British software at the wheel. What is not visible yet is a government strategy for what happens when the safety drivers come out. A robotaxi fleet without a human on board changes the economics of every minicab licence in the city, and Transport for London has been careful not to say what it thinks the end state should be. The industry’s answer, delivered by Uber’s own executives, is that human drivers will be on the app for a long time to come because riders can still choose them. That may be true the way horse-drawn carts were true for a decade after the first car. It is a comfort for now, not a plan.
For the moment, Londoners can order one through the app if they are quick and lucky, because 15 vehicles across the capital is a rounding error. Watch instead for the next announcements: fleet size, which zones get covered, and whether the safety driver requirement survives its first serious incident. Those three things will tell you more about Britain’s robotaxi future than any policy paper. The BBC ride-along already did, and the answer was one intervention on a short journey. Not bad for week one. Not ready either.