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.

When it comes to autonomous vehicles on city roads, that's been the approach in most of the world's countries. But on Tuesday, the UK announced it would put a cautious foot on the pedal, when the Department of Transport said it would accelerate plans to allow companies to operate self-driving cars on public roads in limited pilot programs starting spring of next year. The British government had initially planned to open up its roads for self-driving vehicles more than a year later, in the second half of 2027. "We can see what a massive economic opportunity this technology presents," Transport secretary Heidi Alexander tells WIRED in an interview. The department estimates the autonomous vehicle industry will create 38,000 jobs and generate 42 billion pounds ( 57 million US) for the country by 2035.

With a self-storage warehouse on one side, and a fast-food shop on the other, Wayve's north London facility doesn't look like the headquarters of a company which won a billion-dollar investment from Softbank, Microsoft and Nvidia: The largest-ever capital raise by a European artificial intelligence firm. The plain brick building lies a 10-minute walk north of Kings Cross train station in a rapidly regenerating area. It is central enough for Wayve's 32-year-old founder Alex Kendall to be driven to Downing Street in 25 minutes by one of his autonomous cars, but distant enough for the Primrose Sandwich Bar across the road still to be able to serve a cheap mug of tea. The front doors are permanently shut. Signs direct you to the side, where between the slats of a heavy steel fence you can peer into a yard housing a small fleet of subtly modified, monochrome Jaguar I-Paces and Ford Mustang Mach-Es.

The UK driverless-car startup Wayve is headed west. The firm's cars learned to drive on the streets of London. But Wayve has announced that it will begin testing its tech in and around San Francisco as well, which brings a new challenge: Its AI will need to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right. As visitors to or from the UK will know, making that switch is harder than it sounds. Your view of the road, how the vehicle turns--it's all different.

The move to the US will be a test of Wayve's technology, which the company claims is more general-purpose than what many of its rivals are offering. Wayve's approach has attracted massive investment--including a 1 billion funding round that broke UK records this May--and partnerships with Uber and online grocery firms such as Asda and Ocado. But it will now go head to head with the heavyweights of the growing autonomous-car industry, including Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla. Back in 2022, when I first visited the company's offices in north London, there were two or three vehicles parked in the building's auto shop. But on a sunny day this fall, both the shop and the forecourt are full of cars.

The news: Self-driving car startup Wayve can now interrogate its vehicles, asking them questions about their driving decisions--and getting answers back thanks to a chatbot. How it works: The idea is to use the same tech behind ChatGPT to help train driverless cars. The company combined its existing self-driving software with a large language model, creating a hybrid model that syncs up video data and driving data with natural-language descriptions that capture what the car sees and what it does. Why it matters: Wayve is treating the news as a breakthrough in AI safety. By quizzing its self-driving software every step of the way, Wayve hopes to understand exactly why and how its cars make certain decisions--and to uncover mistakes more quickly.

The UK-based firm has had a string of breakthroughs in the last few years. In 2021 it showed that it could take AI trained on the streets of London and use it to drive cars in four other cities across the UK, a challenge that typically requires significant reengineering. Last year it used that same AI to drive more than one kind of vehicle, another industry first. And now it can chat to its cars. In a demo the company gave me this week, CEO Alex Kendall played footage taken from the camera on one of its Jaguar I-PACE vehicles, jumped to a random spot in the video, and started typing questions: "What's the weather like?" "What hazards do you see?" There is a school on the left.

The advance suggests that Wayve's approach to autonomous vehicles (AVs), in which a deep-learning model is trained to drive from scratch, could help it scale up faster than leading companies like Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla. Wayve is a far smaller company than its bigger and better-funded competitors. But it is part of a new generation of startups, including Waabi and Ghost, sometimes known as AV2.0, that is ditching the robotics mindset embraced by the first wave of driverless car firms--where driverless cars rely on super-detailed 3D maps and separate modules for sensing and planning. Instead, these startups rely entirely on AI to drive the vehicles.

Jay Gierak at Ghost, which is based in Mountain View, California, is impressed by Wayve's demonstrations and agrees with the company's overall viewpoint. "The robotics approach is not the right way to do this," says Gierak. But he's not sold on Wayve's total commitment to deep learning. Instead of a single large model, Ghost trains many hundreds of smaller models, each with a specialism. It then hand codes simple rules that tell the self-driving system which models to use in which situations.

The news: Wayve, a driverless-car startup based in London, has made a machine-learning model that can drive two different types of vehicle: a passenger car and a delivery van. It is the first time the same AI driver has learned to drive multiple vehicles. Why it matters: While robotaxis have made it to a handful of streets in Phoenix and San Francisco, their success has been limited. Wayve is part of a new generation of startups ditching the traditional robotics mindset--where driverless cars rely on super-detailed 3D maps and modules for sensing and planning. Instead, these startups rely entirely on AI to drive the vehicles.