BBCLondoners are able to hail the UK’s first robotaxis – as Uber today becomes the first company to launch a self-driving minicab.
Initially, it only has 15 autonomous vehicles with a licence to operate in the city, and each one must have a human safety driver behind the wheel ready to take control if anything goes wrong.
Uber said it surveyed London-based customers via the app and more than 100,000 said they would choose a self-driving taxi if one was available, despite incidents of driverless rides malfunctioning in US cities where they already operate.
As I found out when I became the first UK journalist to hail one, it was mostly smooth but the safety driver did intervene on one occasion.
Taking a self-driving ride will only appear as an option in the app after the journey has been booked, and if one of its cars is available nearby.
Uber’s global head of autonomous mobility and delivery Sarfraz Maredia said the plan was to phase them in over a period of several years.
“We always want consumers to be able to request a human ride or an autonomous vehicle, and because the market’s growing, we expect that there will be human drivers on Uber London for a long time to come,” he said.
The Ford Mustang electric vehicles which make up Uber’s current small fleet are fitted with the UK tech firm Wayve’s driverless car technology, which uses AI to analyse data about what is going on around it in real time, gathered by sensors in a bar on the roof of the vehicle and elsewhere.
The vehicles are not pre-programmed – their actions are determined on the spot depending on what is going on.
Google’s autonomous car company Waymo and the Chinese tech giant Baidu are also vying to launch services in the UK, and the competition is fierce.
Wayve chief executive Alex Kendall described developing the technology as “the space race for our generation” but added there were some “really hard problems to solve” along the way.
“What we’ve done over time is pioneer a completely new approach to autonomous driving, making it possible to bring this to a busy and complex city like London and scale it globally,” he said.
‘The driver took the wheel’ – what was it like to ride in?
This week I became the first British journalist to travel as a customer in a self-driving Uber after hailing one via the app.
The safety driver gave me a 30-second safety briefing, and then we were off, making our way down the busy streets of central London.
For several minutes, we negotiated the traffic without incident, cruising past a busy Brexit demonstration underway outside parliament, successfully navigating traffic lights and roadworks along the way.
When a cyclist paused and waved us forward at a mini roundabout with his arm, the car complied.
But at one point the safety driver did have to take control of the car.
Just as we were pulling off, the back doors of a van parked beside us on a narrow side road appeared to swing open. The car braked sharply, an internal alarm beeped, and the driver took the wheel.
Wayve later told me it was the driver’s decision to intervene and they were confident their AI system would have handled it.
The drama was all over in a couple of seconds – but it was perhaps the perfect illustration that while the industry may be in a rush, the UK’s regulators are not.
Safety concerns
Earlier this year, the government and the industry had suggested that there could be fully driverless cars for hire in London by the end of 2026, but this is looking increasingly unlikely.
The Department for Transport (DfT) and the regional authority Transport for London (TfL) are responsible for overseeing the process and have faced criticism for being slow.
A DfT spokesperson said the government department was working towards a framework being put in place to ensure self-driving cars could be on the roads in 2027, but didn’t give a specific date.
“These services will be introduced carefully, subject to rigorous safety testing and regulatory approval and will require local consent which can consider the potential impacts on local roads, jobs and communities,” the department said in a statement.
Christina Calderator, director of transport strategy and policy at TfL, said they were “not holding up any decision” on the cars, but instead “taking time to get it right”.
“This is something that’s new, it’s coming to London – we need to make sure it’s safe,” she said.
David McMullen, senior organiser for the trade union GMB, said caution needed to be taken with the roll-out of driverless cars unless people were “prepared to see unprecedented levels of social and economic disruption”.
He called on TfL and the government to develop a plan that “protects drivers” and said until one was put in place, it was “premature” to move to driverless services.
Waymo – another driverless car firm owned by Google’s Alphabet – has cars which have been driving London’s streets for several months carrying out mapping.
These cars currently have a safety driver and members of staff in them – but are not yet for the public.
The firm says it does not intend to introduce a service that would include a human at the wheel.
Experts said there were still numerous safety challenges around self-driving cars for regulators to consider.
Prof Siddartha Khastgir, head of safe autonomy at the University of Warwick’s Warwick Manufacturing Group said there were numerous safety challenges for regulators to consider.
“As human drivers we tend to make a very conscious decision of what we believe is right, and sometimes actually do things that are not perfectly legal – so for example, we tend to mount the kerb to give way to an ambulance,” he said.
“So, how does a self-driving vehicle respond to emergency services? And what are the nuances of doing that in a crowded place like London?”
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