Waymo begins testing autonomous cars on London streets

Waymo's autonomous cars are now driving on London's streets. The law that will govern them does not fully exist yet.

The Alphabet-owned company confirmed this week that it has begun testing vehicles on public roads in the capital, with safety operators behind the wheel, as it works toward a commercial driverless ride-hailing service by September 2026, TechCrunch reported. That target is real. The regulatory pathway it depends on is real too. But the full legal framework that will ultimately define what Waymo is allowed to do in London will not be finished until the second half of 2027, according to the UK government's own implementation timeline.

The gap matters. Waymo is not launching into a settled regulatory environment — it is launching into one that is still being written, and the outcome will shape what autonomous vehicle services look like across Europe.

The mechanism that makes a 2026 launch theoretically possible is the Automated Passenger Services permitting scheme, a piece of secondary legislation that the UK government fast-tracked specifically to enable commercial driverless pilots before the broader Automated Vehicles Act framework is complete. The Department for Transport confirmed that the scheme would launch in spring 2026, allowing companies to operate services with no safety driver and charge passengers, pending regulatory approval, according to the government's own implementation speech.

In London specifically, that approval requires consent from Transport for London, the city's transport regulator. Under the scheme's rules, TfL has a six-week window to respond to any application. If it does not respond in writing within that period, consent is granted automatically. Waymo's entire September 2026 commercial target rests on navigating that window without delay or objection, Zag Daily reported.

"The pilots are intended to inform the creation of a permanent regulatory framework," Zag Daily reported in January, citing the Department for Transport's own language. The full framework — covering vehicle authorization, operator licensing, and broader safety standards — is not expected to be in place until late 2027, according to The Verge.

Waymo has been building toward London for years. In 2019, the company acquired Latent Logic, a startup spun out of Oxford University's computer science department that uses imitation learning to make self-driving simulations more realistic, TechCrunch reported. That acquisition gave Waymo its first permanent engineering presence in the UK. The company has since established hubs in London and Oxford, and has been running vehicles on London streets in manual mode — human drivers mapping the city — for months ahead of the current testing phase.

Today, around 24 Waymo vehicles are operating in the capital, according to Zag Daily, which attended a Waymo event at the London Transport Museum in April. The cars are all-electric Jaguar I-Paces fitted with lidar, radar, cameras, and an onboard computer that monitors 360 degrees and up to three football fields in every direction. Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov posted on LinkedIn that the company's core driving AI was "generalizing very well" in early testing, though he acknowledged that the London rollout still required validating performance on UK roads.

The company has also been quietly building the operational infrastructure that a real service requires. Waymo has hired incident response managers in London to handle what one job posting described as "high-severity, cross-functional incidents," including situations that may involve graphic content. It is conducting market research on which London airports customers would prefer. And it has established a service base at Park Royal in west London, where vehicles are charged, maintained, and prepared for road shifts.

None of this guarantees a September launch. The regulatory consent process is the known chokepoint. If TfL raises objections — on safety grounds, congestion concerns, or licensing policy — Waymo's timeline extends past its target date, possibly by months.

Waymo is not alone in targeting London's streets. Wayve, a UK-based autonomous vehicle startup backed by approximately $1 billion in investment led by SoftBank and Uber, has been testing its vehicles on London roads for years from a base near King's Cross, Sky News reported. Unlike Waymo, which maps each city extensively before autonomous driving begins, Wayve's approach is "mapless" — the system attempts to navigate using real-time sensor data rather than pre-built HD maps of every street. Uber has also signed a separate agreement with Chinese operator Baidu to deploy vehicles on London streets, meaning multiple competing services could arrive in the same regulatory window.

The competition matters because whichever company reaches commercial operation first in London will effectively become the reference point for what autonomous ride-hailing looks like in Europe. Regulators in Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam are watching how the UK handles its first deployments. The safety case, the pricing model, the incident response protocols — all of it will be scrutinized by policymakers across the continent who are writing their own rules. Waymo knows this. Wayve knows this. Both are racing to be the one that gets there first, in front of regulators, in front of the public, and in front of the 100,000 private hire drivers who currently do that work for a living, Londoncentric reported.

That workforce is watching closely. Earlier this year, Uber drivers picketed the City of London's annual government dinner at Mansion House, carrying signs that read "AI = Profit for operators, Destitution for drivers." Sadiq Khan, London's mayor, has described artificial intelligence as a "weapon of mass destruction of jobs" in public remarks. The tension between the economic case for autonomous vehicles — the UK government estimates the sector could add £42 billion to the economy by 2035 and create 38,000 to 40,000 jobs — and the immediate disruption to a large, visible workforce is not abstract. It is playing out in the same city where Waymo is now driving.

The technology itself may settle some of this tension on its own terms. Waymo's own data shows its vehicles were involved in five times fewer injury-causing collisions and twelve times fewer pedestrian injuries per mile than human drivers in comparable US environments, the company said in a London blog post. Whether that record transfers to London, with its narrow streets, zebra crossings without traffic lights, and a pedestrian culture that confuses most drivers who learned to drive elsewhere, is the open question the next 18 months of testing are designed to answer.

What is certain is this: the first company to clear TfL's consent process will effectively write the operating manual for everyone who follows.