London's robotaxis launched — with a licensed driver legally responsible in every car

Uber and Wayve began carrying paying passengers in London on 3 September 2026, in fewer than 20 Ford Mustang Mach-Es fitted with Wayve's system — Britain's first robotaxi service. Every car has a safety driver, and the licensing is why: the vehicles were approved as private hire vehicles rather than as automated vehicles, so a TfL-licensed driver sits at the wheel and remains legally responsible for the whole journey. Riders cannot request a Wayve car; the Uber app may match them with one, which they can accept or decline, at the standard fare. Operating without the safety driver requires a separate approval under the UK pilot framework, with no published timeline. The tracker milestone moves from in-progress to achieved.

Why it matters

A week ago we wrote that London's launch had slipped past 2026, on the grounds that TfL had not published operating guidance and the vehicle-approval steps behind it were unfinished. The service launched five days later. The prediction was wrong on timing and right on mechanism, and the distinction is worth being precise about rather than glossing: what launched is not the thing that was blocked. Paid driverless rides still need an approval nobody has, and Uber and Wayve got on the road by using a licence category that already existed — private hire, human driver responsible — rather than waiting for the automated-vehicle rules to arrive.

That is a genuinely useful discovery, and it generalises. The bottleneck was never the technology or even the regulator's willingness; it was the absence of a legal category for a car with nobody accountable in it. Operators can route around that by keeping a person accountable, which is what "robotaxi with a safety driver" means in law even when the car is driving. The service is real, the ordering is real, and the remaining step — removing the driver — is the one the milestone we logged in August was always pointing at.

What to watch

Whether the UK grants a no-safety-driver approval and to whom first, whether the fleet grows beyond dozens, and whether riders are ever told in advance that a Wayve car is coming.