London’s robotaxi experiment is becoming real rather than hypothetical

Fifteen electric Ford Mustangs using Wayve’s autonomous-driving system are now operating in London through Uber, initially with human safety drivers. More than 140,000 people have signed up to try them. Robotaxis now operate in more than 20 cities globally, many without safety drivers.

The key technological change is the move toward more general vision-language-action models rather than stacks of hand-written driving rules. London is an unusually useful test because narrow streets, cyclists, pedestrians and weird road geometry create much messier inputs than Phoenix-style grids. Waymo’s existing fleet data suggests autonomous vehicles can already outperform human safety rates in their deployed domains, but extrapolating that to arbitrary cities remains the hard part.

Autonomy is approaching the point where the constraint shifts from “can the car drive?” toward regulation, economics and whether the public actually trusts it enough to remove the human.