Driverless taxis from Waymo will be on London's roads next year, US firm announces Wed 15 Oct 2025 05.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 15 Oct 2025 05.02 EDT Driverless taxis from Waymo will be available for hire on London's roads next year, the US company has announced. The UK capital will become the first European city to have an autonomous taxi service of the kind now familiar in San Francisco and four other US cities using Waymo's technology. Waymo said its cars were now on their way to London and would start driving on the capital's streets in the coming weeks with "trained human specialists", or safety drivers, behind the wheel. The company - originally formed as a spin-off from Google's self-driving car programme and part of the same parent group, Alphabet - said it would scale up operations and work closely with the Department for Transport and Transport for London to obtain the necessary permissions to offer fully autonomous rides in 2026. Uber and the UK tech company Wayve have also announced their own plans to trial their driverless taxis in the capital next year, after the British government said it would accelerate rules allowing public trials to take place before legislation enabling self-driving vehicles passes in full.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has put a pause on self-driving car company Waymo's plans to expand its autonomous taxi service in the state. The announcement comes a week after Waymo admitted that not one but two of its self-driving taxis crashed into the very same truck in Arizona back in December. Waymo, which is owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, has had fully autonomous taxis operating in San Francisco since 2022, alongside rival Cruise. The company had requested permission to deploy its fleet of driverless taxis beyond San Francisco in the Bay Area, as well as in Los Angeles. But as of Wednesday, the CPUC has suspended that plan for at least 120 days.

A Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) was reportedly involved in a horrific accident in San Francisco on Monday evening. A pedestrian crossing a street was hit by a car, which sped off. However, the hit-and-run hurled her in front of a Cruise driverless taxi, which stopped on top of her leg as she screamed in pain. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the woman was still in critical condition at 9:30AM ET on Tuesday. The pedestrian was reportedly walking in a crosswalk at Market and Fifth in San Francisco when she was hit by a green car, which fled the scene.

In December 2022, Cruise Automation announced the launch of its fully driverless robotaxi service in Austin. This is the first expansion beyond robotaxi launch in San Francisco this summer by Cruise Automation. It plans to launch its fully-driverless commercial service in more cities in 2023. This month, Uber also announced that it has launched its first robotaxi for commercial use in Las Vegas. Cruise Automation was acquired by General Motors (GM) in 2016 for an undisclosed amount.

It looks like a normal car but the white taxi by the kerb has nobody driving it, and communicates with customers digitally to obtain directions and take payment. Beijing this week approved its first autonomous taxis for commercial use, bringing dozens of the so-called "robotaxis" to the streets of the Chinese capital. The vehicles can only carry two passengers at a time and are confined to the city's southern Yizhuang area. An employee of the taxi firm also sits in the front of the car in case any sudden intervention is needed, but the vehicle drives itself. The roll-out is a significant step forward for the driverless ambitions of Chinese tech giant Baidu and start-up Pony.ai, who were given the green light to deploy the cars on Thursday.

If you don't get seasick, an autonomous boat might be the right mode of transportation for you. Scientists from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Laboratory, together with Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) in the Netherlands, have now created the final project in their self-navigating trilogy: a full-scale, fully autonomous robotic boat that's ready to be deployed along the canals of Amsterdam. "Roboat" has come a long way since the team first started prototyping small vessels in the MIT pool in late 2015. Last year, the team released their half-scale, medium model that was 2 meters long and demonstrated promising navigational prowess. This year, two full-scale Roboats were launched, proving more than just proof-of-concept: these craft can comfortably carry up to five people, collect waste, deliver goods, and provide on-demand infrastructure.

Two years after the Alphabet-owned Waymo launched a limited self-driving taxi service in the Metro Phoenix, Arizona, area (and two years after people started attacking the autonomous cars), the company has kicked off a fully driverless car service in and around Phoenix. Whereas in 2018 passengers would be assuaged by the site of a human in the driver seat, ready to take over in case of an emergency, the newly retooled robot taxi service lacks those human attendants. As Ars Technica notes, this is two years behind schedule for the autonomous mobility company, who initially promised a driverless taxi experience at the end of 2018. Efficacy of self-driving car claims aside, that was the same year that Uber had to suspend its own self-driving car testing in Arizona after one of their test cars (with attendant at the wheel) hit and killed a pedestrian. What did launch in 2018 was the aforementioned Waymo One service, which was only available to research testers previously enrolled with Waymo. So the technology wasn't there yet, but it appears Waymo is more confident this time around.

Nowadays, autonomous taxis become a highly promising transportation mode, which helps relieve traffic congestion and avoid road accidents. However, it hinders the wide implementation of this service that traditional models fail to efficiently allocate the available fleet to deal with the imbalance of supply (autonomous taxis) and demand (trips), the poor cooperation of taxis, hardly satisfied resource constraints, and on-line platform's requirements. To figure out such urgent problems from a global and more farsighted view, we employ a Constrained Multi-agent Markov Decision Processes (CMMDP) to model fleet allocation decisions, which can be easily split into sub-problems formulated as a 'Dynamic assignment problem' combining both immediate rewards and future gains. We also leverage a Column Generation algorithm to guarantee the efficiency and optimality in a large scale. Through extensive experiments, the proposed approach not only achieves remarkable improvements over the state-of-the-art benchmarks in terms of the individual's efficiency (arriving at 12.40%, 6.54% rise of income and utilization, respectively) and the platform's profit (reaching 4.59% promotion) but also reveals a time-varying fleet adjustment policy to minimize the operation cost of the platform.

Jonathan Frankle and Michael Carbin, of Lottery Ticket fame, and Alex Renda, have made the perfect pruner, shrinking neural networks as much as you please, without sacrificing accuracy. And, the method is dead simple. When you add up the utility gained at the edge, these researchers are worth their weight in Californium. Paul Erdos, one of the greatest and by far the most prolific mathematician of the last century, would fall in love with those proofs and theorems which, by their utter simplicity, elegance, breadth of impact, and insightful technique, must have come from "The Book." By that, Erdos meant that scroll of truths God used to make the world.

Sign in to report inappropriate content. Airbus has successfully performed the first fully automatic vision-based take-off using an Airbus Family test aircraft at Toulouse-Blagnac airport. The test crew comprising of two pilots, two flight test engineers and a test flight engineer took off initially at around 10h15 on 18 December and conducted a total of 8 take-offs over a period of four and a half hours.