London licenses its first robotaxi fleet — fifteen Wayve cars, and a safety driver in every one

Transport for London has granted private hire vehicle licences to a fleet of up to fifteen Ford Mustang Mach-E cars fitted with Wayve’s self-driving system, each licence valid for a year. It is the permission that matters commercially: without it the cars could be tested, but not used to carry passengers who pay. The service will run with Uber, which says more than a hundred thousand Londoners have put their names on an interest list since June, and rides are expected later this summer. The important caveat is in the licence itself — a trained safety driver stays behind the wheel at all times. This is supervised autonomy, not the driverless service Waymo runs in American cities, and TfL framed the approval in terms of its Vision Zero road-safety goal rather than as a step towards removing the driver. Wayve is unusual among self-driving companies in training a single end-to-end model to drive rather than assembling a stack of hand-written rules, and in claiming that the same model can be moved between cities and vehicle types. London is the first place where that claim will be tested with fare-paying passengers on board.