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.

Self-driving Ubers are expected to appear on roads in London next year after the government said trials of fully autonomous vehicles would be brought forward to spring 2026. Companies will be allowed to run pilots of small-scale taxi or "bus-like" services for public use – and, for the first time in Europe, without any human safety driver onboard or in the driving seat. Uber will partner with the UK tech firm Wayve to launch trials of taxis bookable via its app in the capital, its largest European market. A fuller rollout of self-driving taxis, or robotaxis, will come after the Automated Vehicles Act fully takes effect in late 2027. The UK has sped up the process now that driverless taxis have become established in San Francisco in the US and numerous cities in China. Uber rolled out its first driverless taxis with the US firm Waymo in Austin, Texas, in March this year, where Tesla is also planning to launch a rival autonomous service this month.

On April 14, Waymo will start testing its robotaxi technology outside the US for the first time. Waymo is taking it slow and will not be operating them without a driver behind the wheel yet, however. Drivers from Tokyo taxi company Nihon Kotsu Co. will be driving the cars around Chiyoda, Minato, Shinjuku and four other wards in the Japanese capital. The cameras and radars equipped on the I-PACE vehicles will collect data on Tokyo's roads, which are typically narrower than roads in the US. They'll provide the company with information on local infrastructure, road conditions and the driving patterns of locals.

General Motors' robotaxi service Cruise has inked a multi-year deal with Uber. The deal will let Uber customers hail a Cruise self-driving taxi from their smartphone starting next year, according to TechCrunch. This means that Cruise's self-driving taxis will be back on roads for the first time since striking a pedestrian in San Francisco in October 2023. A spokesperson told the website that the new partnership between Cruise and Uber would follow Cruise's re-launch of its own driverless taxi service in 2025. Cruise is currently testing cars with human drivers on roads in Dallas, Phoenix and Houston with plans to expand to more cities.

This story originally appeared on WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese. A project to develop autonomous vehicles for self-driving taxis has begun in earnest in Japan. The plan put forward by Tier IV, a startup specializing in autonomous-driving technology, has been selected for a demonstration project by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. Now, a prototype development project has officially begun. Tier IV became known for developing open-source self-driving software and conducting demonstrations of self-driving taxis in May and June in Odaiba, an entertainment district of Tokyo.

Waymo is voluntarily recalling its robotaxis after one of them collided with a telephone pole in an alley enroute to pick up a passenger, The Verge reported. The vehicle was unoccupied and no bystanders were injured. At the time of the May 21st accident, the Waymo vehicle went through an alley lined with telephone poles mounted at street level rather than on a curb, with a yellow line showing where to drive. While pulling over, it struck one of the poles at 8 MPH and sustained some damage, Waymo said. "It never made it to pick us up," the passenger waiting for the car, Jericka Mitchell, told 12News.

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.

Cruise has finally launched an Android app for ridehailing, giving potential customers in San Francisco the option to call one of its robotaxis even if they're not iPhone users. The self-driving car company told Engadget that 20 percent of its waitlisters are on Android, and an app for the platform is one of people's most-requested updates on social media. Cruise's new Android app will come with all the upgrades the iOS app has received since it launched, including the ability to drop a moveable pin on the map by long pressing on the screen. The company recently started operating in all areas of San Francisco 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Employees have been able to hail robotaxi rides from across the city at all hours for months, but Cruise opened daytime rides to public "power users" in specific portions of the city back in April.

No fatalities or serious injuries have been reported in Cruise cars, but the auto safety agency said the vehicles could potentially put people at risk. When Cruise taxis stop unexpectedly, they "may strand vehicle passengers in unsafe locations, such as lanes of travel or intersections, and become an unexpected obstacle to other road users," the agency said in its filing. "These immobilizations may increase the risk to exiting passengers. Further, immobilization may cause other road users to make abrupt or unsafe maneuvers to avoid colliding with the immobilized Cruise vehicle." The investigation covers 242 vehicles and is the first step before the agency could force G.M. to recall vehicles. This year, Cruise began offering autonomous taxi rides in part of San Francisco and during low-traffic nighttime hours.

When transit systems experience delays, the reason usually isn't very interesting: congested streets, medical emergencies, mechanical problems. But the cause of a recent holdup on San Francisco's MUNI system at least had the virtue of being novel. On Sept. 30 at around 11 p.m., an N Line streetcar ground to a halt at the intersection of Carl Street and Cole Street because an autonomous vehicle from Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, had halted on the streetcar tracks and wouldn't budge. According to the city's transportation department, the 140 passengers riding the N line that evening were stuck in place for seven minutes before a Cruise employee arrived and moved the driverless conveyance. This incident, which was not reported in the media at the time, is one of many in which autonomous vehicles roaming San Francisco's streets have disrupted the city's transportation network.