Uber and Wayve’s September London launch put autonomous vehicles on the Uber app — but with a safety driver in the front seat, not full robotaxis.
The Londoner reports a 3 September Lindley Hall event sold as autonomous rides for the first time actually celebrated about 12 supervised Wayve cars in a city of nine million alongside tens of thousands of licensed drivers. Government had talked of spring robotaxi services; FT briefings blamed TfL for missing guidelines. The Londoner’s reporting says the delay story is more tangled — TfL internal conflict, technology limits and City Hall politics — than a simple regulator block. Full unsupervised commercial robotaxis were not arriving in London this year under that launch.