London’s iconic black cabs could soon face a new rival: Waymo.
The Alphabet-owned company said today it intends to launch a fully driverless robotaxi service in London, starting in 2026 — marking its first effort to expand internationally.
The UK currently doesn’t have any fully driverless vehicles on the road. The government has said it will start piloting fully driverless ridehail services in spring 2026, though a fuller rollout of self-driving taxis won’t come until the Automated Vehicles Act of 2024 fully takes effect in late 2027.
Waymo says it will start deploying supervised robotaxis, with safety drivers behind the wheel, for data collection in London in the next few weeks. When it launches its commercial service next year, its fully driverless robotaxis will be available through Waymo’s own ridehail app. The vehicles will be maintained by a company called Moove, which provides fleet services, as well as a range of financial products for mobility companies. (Moove is also managing Waymo’s fleets in Phoenix, Austin, and soon Miami.)
The government has said it will start piloting fully driverless ridehail services in spring 2026.
Waymo has been eyeing London for a while now. Last month, The Telegraph reported that the company had begun advertising for staff in the UK capitol, including a “fleet readiness lead” and various engineers. Waymo says it has “strong ties” in the UK, citing its engineering hubs in London and Oxford. These hubs include teams advancing large-scale, closed-loop simulation, “a gold standard development method for fully autonomous driving technology,” the company says in a blog post.
London won’t be the first overseas city to see Waymo’s distinctively driverless Jaguar SUVs. The company recently sent two dozen vehicles to Tokyo for a small trial, though it has yet to commit to launching a service there.
To be sure, Waymo tests its vehicles in lots of cities where it may or may not launch a commercial service. It does this to see how well its vehicles adapt to new cities after having driven tens of millions of miles in its core markets of San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. Ideally, the company is trying to get to a point where it can bring its vehicles to a new city and launch a robotaxi with a minimal amount of testing as a preamble.
