Uber opened a waitlist in London on Monday for rides in a self-driving car powered by Wayve, a British AI startup. Londoners can sign up through the Uber app settings under passenger preferences. When the service goes live, people on the list get priority matching with a Wayve vehicle at standard UberX prices, no premium charged.
The vehicle being used is a black Ford Mustang Mach-E fitted with cameras and radar but no lidar, the expensive laser-ranging technology that most rival systems rely on. Wayve's approach is different: it trains a single AI model on large amounts of video data from real roads, the same way a person learns to drive by watching and doing, rather than following a rigid map of every street. A safety operator sits in the driver's seat throughout the initial phase. Fully driverless operation comes later.
Wayve is a Cambridge-founded company that started in 2017. Its founders were told the approach would not work. Nine years on, the company has raised $1.5 billion, is valued at $8.6 billion, and counts Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis among its backers. In the past year, it drove the same AI model in over 500 cities across Europe, North America, and Japan without city-specific reprogramming, something no rival has matched.
Uber's role in the partnership is to own and operate the fleet, while Wayve supplies the AI software that does the actual driving. Uber has committed additional milestone-based funding to scale Wayve-powered robotaxis across more than ten global markets. London is the first. Tokyo, under a separate deal with Wayve and Nissan, is being prepared for late 2026.
London will not have just one driverless player. Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google's parent Alphabet, is targeting a commercial London launch by September 2026. That would be Waymo's first city outside the United States. Around 24 Waymo vehicles are already on London streets today, driven by humans for mapping and data collection. Waymo intends to launch with no driver at all from day one of commercial service.
The regulatory groundwork is in place. The UK passed the world's first comprehensive law for self-driving vehicles in 2024. The government then went further: in June 2025, it announced it would fast-track commercial pilot permits to spring 2026, a full year earlier than the original 2027 target. Under that framework, companies can carry paying passengers with or without a safety driver, once they meet safety requirements and get local consent from Transport for London.
The safety bar is clear. To receive a permit, a self-driving system must demonstrate it is at least as safe as a careful human driver. Waymo's US data shows its vehicles are involved in roughly 90 percent fewer serious-injury crashes per mile than human drivers. That record will matter to UK regulators, and to the public.
For businesses, the near-term practical change is limited. These are early trials, not mass deployment. But the direction is set. Uber's explicit goal is to become the world's largest autonomous vehicle operator by 2029, with launches planned across at least 15 cities in 2026 alone. The company's entire strategy is to make driverless rides available on an app that most urban professionals already use daily. When that happens at scale, the cost of a business trip across a city changes, the demand for company car fleets changes, and the way businesses think about employee travel changes. The signal is early, but it is real.