Robotaxis could start operating in regulated public trials as early as spring 2026 - but the rules are yet to be fully established, and testing may include a safety driver for some time. Robotaxis could start operating in regulated public trials as early as spring 2026 - but the rules are yet to be fully established, and testing may include a safety driver for some time. The age-old question from the back of the car feels just as pertinent as a new era of autonomy threatens to dawn: are we nearly there yet? For Britons, long-promised fully driverless cars, the answer is as ever - yes, nearly. A landmark moment on the journey to autonomous driving is, again, just around the corner.

Having plied their trade in several US and Chinese cities for years, driverless taxis are on their way to London. As a cyclist, a Londoner and a journalist who has spent years covering AI's pratfalls, I am a tad nervous. Yet, given how often I have been struck by inattentive human drivers in London, part of me is cautiously optimistic. At the end of the day it boils down to this: will I be better off surrounded by tired, distracted and angry humans, or unpredictable and imperfect AI? The UK government has decided to allow firms like Uber to run pilots of self-driving "taxi- and bus-like" services in 2026.

Mike Johns boarded a driverless Waymo taxi to an airport in Scottsdale, Arizona, but it began spinning in circles in a parking lot. He filmed the moment he was trapped in the vehicle, unable to stop the car or get help. Johns said he almost missed his flight.

Even experienced drivers can be forgiven for missing a roundabout exit once or twice, but a disoriented robotaxi in Arizona did it 36 times… in a row. While Waymo taxis are among the most advanced autonomous vehicles on the road today, in a video posted earlier this month on X, a confused AV appears to be quite literally stuck in a loop. Sorry I'm late, my WAYMO did 37 laps in the roundabout pic.twitter.com/GSR4sqChV2 And yet, even with blunders like these, there were more vehicles driving themselves this year than ever before. Once cordoned off to a few test tracks and small patches of land in Mountain View, AVs are now rearing their sensors-flapping heads in more than a dozen US cities. Tens of millions of drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians are learning how to coexist amongst these machines while their shared roads serve as real-world test-beds for full-scale AV deployment.

Waymo's fleet of driverless vehicles are operating in more cities and a study indicates that may reduce crashes on roadways. The study, a non-paid partnership between Waymo itself and reinsurer Swiss Re, indicated Waymo's cars result in fewer insurance claims than those operated by people. Swiss Re analyzed liability claims from collisions covering 25.3 million miles driven by Waymo's autonomous cars. The study also compared Waymo's liability claims to human driver baselines based on data from over 500,000 claims and over 200 billion driving miles. The results found that Waymo Driver "demonstrated better safety performance when compared to human-driver vehicles.".

Waymo will deploy its driverless cars in Japan and will test its technology in another country for the first time. According to CNBC, the company will begin testing its Jaguar I-PACE vehicles in Tokyo in early 2025 and expects to remain in the country for an "extended period." During the vehicles' experimental phase, which will last for several quarters, human drivers from the Japanese taxi company Nihon Kotsu will operate Waymo's cars so that its technology can map the city. The data gathered from those tests will then be used to train the company's self-driving system. Waymo will also be recreating Tokyo's driving conditions in a closed course in the US, where it will put more of its robotaxis to the test, and will be using data collected from that effort for training.

Late last month, a Tesla owner shared shocking dashcam footage of his Model 3 appearing to collide with and drive through a deer at high speeds. The car, which the driver says was engaged in Tesla's driver-assist Full-Self Driving (FSD) mode, never detected the deer standing in the middle of the road and didn't hit the brakes or maneuver to avoid it. That case came just a few months after a vehicle from Waymo, a leading self-driving company, reportedly ran over and killed a pet dog in a collision the company says was "unavoidable." Neither driverless cars, according to reports detailing the incidents, spotted the animals on the road fast enough to avoid them. Video is cut right before sensitive things appear on screen.

When product testers told us that our robo-cars "lacked humanity" and felt like "soulless, uncanny harbingers of doom," we listened, and updated our software to make your driving experience feel more human than ever before. Let's just say, the next time you curse out a maniac swerving recklessly in front of you, it may not be a person you want to run off the road. When it comes to defensive driving, we believe that the best defense is a good offense--and thanks to your valuable feedback, nothing is more offensive than our human-inspired driverless vehicles. New advanced driver-assistance settings range from "Driving Too Slow in the Fast Lane" to "Driving Too Fast in the Slow Lane," and all selections include meaningless lane changes that never actually save any time. There's even an option to run red lights and drive over the speed limit if you're running a little late, there's an emergency, or you simply want to passive-aggressively communicate anger to a difficult passenger.

Waymo One is now available to all customers anywhere in LA county, which is 80 square miles. The company has dropped the waitlist for area residents. Now LA residents will get to experience sitting in endless traffic with a series of cameras and navigational algos leading the way instead of a person. This expanded service starts today and it offers "fully autonomous rides" at any time of the day or night. Let's hear it for some drunken late night bonding with an algorithm.

The artificial intelligence systems that control driverless cars can still struggle to predict the sudden appearance of other vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians – but a new algorithm has shown how they can more accurately anticipate the presence of such hidden objects, and predict their movements. "We ensured that it captured real-world complexities like hidden pedestrians or cyclists moving unpredictably," says Hari Thiruvengada at VERSES AI, a cognitive computing company headquartered in California. "We added occlusion reasoning to help anticipate the behaviour of road users hidden from direct…