London riders can now book a self-driving taxi through the Uber app, after Wayve's robotaxis went live this week. It sounds bigger than it is. Only 15 vehicles are licensed so far, against more than 100,000 private hire cars already working the city, and roughly that same number of Uber customers who have signed up to try a ride.
There is also a human in the car. Transport for London licensed these Ford Mustangs as private hire vehicles on the condition that a trained safety driver sits up front, hands ready, in case the software needs help. That is not a technicality Uber can quietly drop later. Full driverless approval has to come from a separate body, the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, and that sign off is not expected this year.
The bigger legal picture explains why. The UK passed the Automated Vehicles Act in 2024 to set rules for who is responsible when a self-driving car crashes, but the government has already pushed back full implementation once, from 2026 to the second half of 2027. Regulation, not the technology, is currently the slowest part of this race.
Money is not the obstacle. Wayve has raised more than a billion dollars from SoftBank, Microsoft and Nvidia, with reports of talks for another two billion dollars that would value the company near eight billion dollars, and Uber itself has put in hundreds of millions more. That kind of capital buys years of runway to keep testing before the company has to turn a profit.
London is not just a market, it is a battleground. Google's Waymo and China's Baidu are both testing their own robotaxis on London streets, and whoever gets full approval first gets a huge head start selling into the rest of Europe. Uber's answer is to avoid picking a winner. It has struck deals with more than 30 self-driving companies globally and put over ten billion dollars into the space, betting it can stay the app that riders open no matter which car shows up.
The honest number came from Uber's own autonomous vehicle chief: nobody can run a robotaxi cheaper than a human driver yet. That single line does more to set expectations than anything else in this launch. Cheaper rides are the whole economic case for robotaxis, and that case has not been proven anywhere, including in London.
For drivers, the picture is calmer than the headlines suggest, for now. The GMB union has warned that hundreds of thousands of UK driving jobs could eventually be at risk. But current data shows private hire vehicle numbers actually growing while older black cab numbers shrink, a trend driven by app based hailing generally rather than robots. The bigger near term shift is happening in insurance, where new rules split legal responsibility between the vehicle maker and the company running the service, forcing insurers to build entirely new products before any of this scales.
Treat this launch as a regulatory and financial milestone, not a labor market event. The real test comes if and when the safety driver is removed, and that is a 2027 story at the earliest.