Wayve and Uber win London's first robotaxi licences

Wayve and Uber have taken a real step towards putting self-driving cars on London’s streets. Transport for London has granted private hire vehicle licences to 15 of Wayve’s electric cars, Ford Mustang Mach-E models fitted with the London company’s AI driving software, cameras, and radar. The two firms plan to offer their first trips later this summer to people who have registered interest, ahead of a wider public launch later in the year.

These are supervised rides, not driverless ones. A trained, TfL-licensed private hire driver sits behind the wheel throughout, ready to take over, while the car does the driving. Getting here meant clearing London’s “triple-lock” for private hire trips, under which the operator, the driver, and the vehicle must all hold valid licences from the same authority. It is a careful, staged way in, and it makes London one of the first major European cities lining up passenger robotaxi services.

For Wayve, this is a landmark. It is one of the UK’s most valuable AI companies, and its home city is now where it gets to show its technology carrying real passengers. It also sharpens a growing UK cluster in self-driving: the Oxford company Oxa is working on autonomy for industrial and commercial vehicles, and the government opened applications earlier this year for operators to run self-driving taxi and bus services across Great Britain.

What makes Wayve worth watching is how its cars drive. Rather than the older approach of hand-written rules stitched onto expensive lidar sensors, Wayve trains a single AI model to drive end to end, learning from data and reading the road mostly through computer vision, the same camera-based perception that lets software recognise what it is looking at. The company describes the result as a driving foundation model, a general system meant to handle situations it was never explicitly programmed for. London’s messy, unpredictable streets will be a demanding place to prove that it works.