- Wayve and Uber began supervised autonomous rides in London on September 3, 2026.
- No separate app needed — Wayve cars are matched through Uber’s existing booking flow.
- Waymo and Baidu, via both Uber and Lyft’s network, are racing into the same city.
London has its first taste of autonomous ride-hailing. Wayve and Uber switched on supervised autonomous rides in the UK capital on September 3, 2026, giving the public its first chance to book a ride powered by a British self-driving system through a mainstream ride-hailing app.
The rides are supervised for now: a trained, Transport for London-licensed driver sits in the vehicle and can take over if needed. Reuters reports fewer than 20 vehicles are running at launch. More than 140,000 Londoners have already opted in for a chance to be matched with one.
“We’re proud to introduce the Wayve AI Driver to the public for the first time right here in London, our home city and one of the most complex driving environments in the world,” said Alex Kendall, Wayve’s co-founder and chief executive.
How Londoners can get a ride
No separate app or sign-up is needed. Here’s what actually happens:
- Open the Uber app and request an UberX, Uber Comfort or Uber Electric as normal — Wayve cars are matched through Uber’s existing booking flow, not a standalone product
- Riders can turn on autonomous vehicle preferences in the app to raise their odds of being matched with a Wayve car, at no extra cost either way
- If matched, the app and an in-car screen show the planned route, in any of 64 languages
- Riders can decline the Wayve match and switch to a regular driver before the car arrives — nothing is locked in
- Coverage spans London, excluding airports for now, with a Transport for London-licensed safety driver in every car
Fewer than 20 vehicles are running at launch, so most riders in the 140,000-strong waitlist still won’t be matched immediately. Wayve and Uber have said they’ll expand the fleet gradually based on demand and regulatory sign-off.
London becomes Wayve’s proving ground
The fleet consists of all-electric Ford Mustang Mach-E cars fitted with Wayve’s AI Driver and surround sensors. The launch follows Transport for London’s decision in August to grant Wayve’s vehicles Private Hire Vehicle licences, at which point over 100,000 Londoners had already joined the waitlist. Full driverless operation still depends on further regulatory approval.
Wayve was founded in 2017 by Alex Kendall and Amar Shah, two machine-learning researchers at the University of Cambridge. Shah left in 2020; Kendall has run the company since.
Their vision was that self-driving cars should learn to drive from real-world data rather than rely on detailed maps and hand-coded rules, an approach the company calls AV2.0, designed to generalise across cities and vehicle types without local reprogramming.
The launch caps a fast-moving year for Wayve’s finances. It raised $1.2 billion in Series D funding in February at an $8.6 billion valuation, led by Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with Microsoft, NVIDIA and Uber joining alongside automakers Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis. Uber also committed separate milestone-based capital tied to robotaxi deployments.
Two months later, the round grew by another $60 million from chipmakers AMD, Arm and Qualcomm Ventures, bringing total funds raised to $1.5 billion. By July, the company was letting staff cash out $85 million in stock at the same valuation.
Uber wants the platform, not just the fleet
Wayve doesn’t want to run its own robotaxi fleet. Its model is to license the AI driving layer while automakers supply vehicles and platforms like Uber supply riders.
Uber first invested in Wayve in 2024, and the relationship has expanded steadily since. In June, Stellantis, Wayve and Uber signed a memorandum of understanding to explore Level 4 driverless robotaxis globally, with Stellantis supplying vehicle platforms and Wayve the AI layer.
“This partnership brings together three leaders, each with our own strengths,” said Kaity Fischer, Wayve’s vice president of commercial and operations, at the announcement. Wayve and Uber are also preparing a Tokyo pilot with Nissan, using the Nissan Leaf, targeted for later this year pending regulatory sign-off.
“We’re delighted to bring autonomous rides to Uber riders in London for the very first time, powered by Wayve, a homegrown British success story,” added Sarfraz Maredia, Uber’s global head of autonomous mobility, who also marked the launch on LinkedIn.
Waymo, Baidu and the fight for London’s robotaxi market
The bigger story is who’s coming next. Alphabet’s Waymo has confirmed its own commercial robotaxi launch in London for 2026, using all-electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles run through fleet partner Moove — the same city, the same year, a direct rival on Wayve’s doorstep.
Waymo raised $16 billion in February 2026 at a $126 billion valuation, dwarfing Wayve’s war chest more than tenfold. “We’re thrilled to bring the reliability, safety and magic of Waymo to Londoners,” Waymo co-chief executive Tekedra Mawakana said when the London plan was announced.
The two services won’t even sit in the same app. Wayve’s rides live inside Uber, so any of Uber’s existing London users can be matched into one without downloading anything new. Waymo runs its own standalone app in London, holding the local operating permit directly rather than routing demand through a partner — the same model it’s increasingly favouring in US markets like New York, Denver and Boston.
That distribution gap is arguably Wayve’s biggest structural advantage over a much better-funded rival: it doesn’t need to win riders’ attention, just their existing habit of opening Uber.
Uber, for its part, isn’t betting on Wayve alone. Chinese autonomous driving firm Baidu has begun testing its own robotaxis on both the Uber and Freenow-by-Lyft networks in London, meaning Uber is hedging with a second AV supplier in the very city where it’s publicly launching with Wayve.
London isn’t even Uber’s first robotaxi market in Europe, either: that was Zagreb, where the service runs on Pony.ai’s technology through local partner Verne, not Wayve’s.
That leaves London as the most contested robotaxi battleground outside the US: a Cambridge-born AI stack riding on Uber’s existing app, a $126 billion Alphabet unit launching its own, and a Chinese challenger testing on two networks at once, all vying for the same narrow, jaywalker-heavy streets. The first rides are small and supervised.
The question Wayve now has to answer, on its own home turf, is whether distribution through an app people already have beats a better-funded rival’s standalone one, or a hedge sitting one tap away on the same app it’s launching on.
“This is a major milestone for the future of transport in London, as British innovation brings this technology onto our roads and gives passengers more choice,” said Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander.
