Londoners can now be matched with a Wayve robotaxi inside the Uber app

Londoners can now be matched with a self-driving taxi inside the Uber app. The service opened on 3 September with 15 electric Ford Mustang Mach-E cars fitted with Wayve’s AI Driver. A Transport for London-licensed private-hire driver sits in the front seat and can take the wheel. Airports are excluded. The fare is the same as a normal UberX, Uber Electric or Uber Comfort trip.

Riders do not request a robotaxi by name. If the system offers one, they can accept it or switch back to a human-driven car before it arrives. Uber says more than 140,000 London accounts have already opted in through Trip Preferences. An in-car screen, built by Uber and offered in 64 languages, shows the planned path and lets the passenger start the trip from the phone.

The technical claim is specific. Wayve, founded in 2017 by two Cambridge machine-learning students, does not rely on a dense prior map of every kerb. Its AV2.0 system is trained to generalise, which is why the companies say there is no geofence. That is a departure from the usual robotaxi model, in which cars are confined to streets that have been surveyed centimetre by centimetre. Whether the claim survives rain, roadworks and a black-cab pinch point in Soho is what the 15-car fleet is meant to test.

Regulation is split. TfL has licensed the cars as private-hire vehicles, which is why a safety driver is still required. Fully driverless operation would need a separate approval from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency. Alex Kendall, Wayve’s chief executive, would not give a date. Analysts quoted in the British press have pointed to 2027 or 2028. Wayve plans to move from modified Mustangs to factory Nissan Leafs once it has safety numbers on that platform.

Uber beat Waymo to a public London launch. Waymo has been preparing its own service. The prize is the largest ride-hail market in Europe and one of the hardest street grids in the rich world. More than half of London driving-test candidates fail. Medieval lanes, bus lanes, cyclists and temporary barriers are the daily texture. A system that can handle that grid without a high-definition map would be exportable. A system that cannot will remain a supervised novelty.

Maintenance sits with Uber and the fleet firm Otto Car. Wayve keeps the driving stack. The safety drivers are TfL-licensed. That split will matter if a crash occurs: the question will be which company owned the decision that the car made a second before impact.

Wayve raised its name in the autonomous-vehicle world by betting against lidar-heavy stacks. Cameras and a learning model are cheaper to put on a production car. They are also harder to validate when the test track is Westminster in the rain. Kendall has said the technology is still maturing. That sentence is the honest summary of Thursday’s launch.

For now the public product is modest. Fifteen cars. A human in the seat. No airports. An opt-in button. The policy fight over driverless operation has been postponed, not settled. What changed on Thursday is that a London passenger can, for the first time, pay a normal Uber fare and sit in a car whose steering wheel is not being held until something goes wrong.