Uber and Wayve are putting robot taxis on London roads earlier than planned

London’s getting Uber’s robot taxi trial sooner than the UK government initially said it would last month.

The trial will see cars without a driver take to the UK’s capital to shuttle paying customers around under Cambridge-born start-up Wayve’s autonomous driving wizardry.

"This is a defining moment for UK autonomy," says co-founder and chief Alex Kendal. "With Uber and a global OEM partner, we’re preparing to put our AI Driver technology into real service on the streets of London, delivering on our AV2.0 vision for scalable autonomy."

That OEM partner (bizspeak for ‘carmaker') hasn’t been disclosed yet, but Wayve and Uber have previously deployed the Ford Mustang Mach-E and Jaguar I-Pace and only one of those is produced anymore.

Secretary of State for Transport, Heidi Alexander, made the announcement to revise the 2027 date at London Tech Week 2025. By flexing the regulatory timeline, the government hopes to capitalise on the mammoth amount of economic growth autonomous cars are predicted to create – some 38,000 jobs and £42 billion could be generated by 2035.

Professor Siddartha Khastgir, Head of Safe Autonomy at WMG at The University of Warwick, said: “While we support the Government’s decision to enable pilots of self-driving taxis and buses by Spring 2026, the success of these will only be realised if measures are put in place to enable learnings, data collection and enable sharing.

"We urge the Government to put practical but mandatory data sharing from the pilots. These learnings will help better define the safety threshold of a ‘careful and competent human driver’.”

The robotaxis will not be deployed with a safety driver, as has been the case with robotaxi taxis trials in the UK to date. Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said: “[The UK] can’t afford to take a back seat on AI, unless it’s on a self-driving bus.”