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| Why London has become battleground for self-driving taxis http://www.taxi-driver.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=42933 |
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| Author: | StuartW [ Thu Oct 01, 2026 7:13 am ] |
| Post subject: | Why London has become battleground for self-driving taxis |
Some of the stuff in here is related to that highlighted a few weeks ago. This is tad nerdy, though. Why London has become the battleground for self-driving taxis https://www.thetimes.com/business/techn ... -vpx8phb36 Wayve, Waymo and Apollo Go are battling it out in the capital because if robotaxis can operate successfully on its chaotic roads they will surely work anywhere The winding streets of London will take centre stage as some of the world’s largest tech companies go head-to-head in the race to dominate the global autonomous vehicle market. Three companies from different continents hope to convince Londoners that their vehicles are safe and reliable over the coming year. Wayve, a London-based start-up and a national tech champion, released a small fleet of 15 vehicles in September through Uber. The vehicles still have safety drivers inside, so they are not yet fully autonomous robotaxis. Waymo, backed by Alphabet and valued at $126bn, is planning to release its first fully autonomous vehicles, potentially by the end of the year, although the company is still awaiting final regulatory approvals. Apollo Go, the robotaxi division of the Chinese tech giant Baidu, is testing vehicles in Brent and hopes to release a fully autonomous service next year. McKinsey estimates that the global autonomous vehicle market could be worth as much as $470bn by 2035. While London will likely account for about $12bn of that, Ani Kelkar, a partner at the consulting giant, said the city could become “an important test case for the industry”. “London could become one of the first major cities where several leading international robotaxi players compete directly,” he said, potentially providing a launch pad for the rest of Europe. “Lessons from London could be relevant elsewhere in Europe, where ride-hailing and taxi markets tend to be more regulated than in the US.” But London is not an easy place to drive. It has 20 times the amount of road construction as San Francisco, and ten times the number of vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists. This makes it a different challenge to the grid systems of American and Chinese cities. For foreign companies, driving on the left side of the road may also pose a challenge. Wayve argues that it is well-placed to deal with these issues. Unlike other driverless cars, which have been trained on very detailed maps and explicitly programmed for possible situations, Wayve’s vehicles have been trained on vast amounts of real-world data. “Our vehicle intelligence learns very much like a human would, through hundreds of thousands of hours of on-road experience,” Kaity Fischer, Wayve’s VP of commercial and operations, said. “When you look at cities like London, which are some of the most diverse, chaotic streets in the world and the most complex, it’s nearly impossible to hand-code for the litany of things that you see.” This is not so much a matter of safety. Instead, Fischer argued that the single model underpinning Wayve’s vehicles would give it the ability to scale faster than rivals. “We don’t rely on high-definition maps, which means that we don’t have to operate within a ‘geofence’,” she said, referring to a boundary which limits where some driverless cars could go. “We can scale to larger geographies faster, and on many more vehicle platforms.” The company, most recently valued at $8.6bn, previously said it hoped to launch in Tokyo before the end of the year, and announced its intention to introduce services in ten additional markets with Uber, although it had not yet given a timeline for these releases. The company also signed partnerships with carmakers including Mercedes, Nissan and Stellantis to put its software into privately-owned vehicles. As a result, Wayve’s artificial intelligence systems will get access to masses of additional training data. Fischer said: “Our vehicles are able to learn through all of those deployments … The personally owned vehicle that’s being sold in Japan or in the United States or in Europe. All of that diversity of on-road intelligence and data feeds into the underlying intelligence.” A big question for Wayve is how important the robotaxi business really is. Pedro Pacheco, an analyst at Gartner, a research company, said a software business was a “much more attractive” offering than a robotaxi business. “The reason is simple: there are a lot more production cars on the market than robotaxis, so your total available market is incomparably larger,” he said. Robotaxis were still useful for “prestige,” Pacheco added, and had greater autonomy than commercial cars, so acted as a “good test bed” for Wayve’s software. Currently, the Ford Mustangs in operation across London have private-hire vehicle licenses, rather than the automated passenger services permit that would allow Wayve to remove the driver. It will only apply for the fully autonomous licence when it rolls out its Nissan Leaf, which has been purpose-built to be driverless rather than retrofitted and is expected to be released in Tokyo this year. Waymo, which was spun out of Google in 2016, has already started the process to receive authorisation to offer fully driverless vehicles in London The company has been operating a fully autonomous service in Phoenix, Arizona, since 2020 and now offers rides in 15 cities across the US. It provides half a million driverless rides per week. A Waymo spokesman said the company’s record across the US would enable it to “deliver tangible benefits to London”. “Experience matters,” the spokesman said. “Years of public operation have continually improved our service.” The company is also looking to expand in Munich and Tokyo. Apollo Go, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Baidu, one of China’s largest tech conglomerates, has operated since 2021. The company says it has a footprint in 28 cities, including those where it is conducting testing. Its most recent weekly journey count was 300,000. A spokesman said: “Apollo Go brings more than a decade of autonomous driving development, extensive expertise in fully driverless operations at scale, and experience across both left-hand-drive and right-hand-drive markets like Hong Kong.” Apollo Go’s RT-6 vehicle, which will launch in London, has been purpose-built for running an autonomous service, which the company says is a “major differentiator”. “Having a vehicle designed from the ground up to be a robotaxi allows the vehicle’s hardware, software and safety systems to be engineered as one integrated whole, instead of retrofitting conventional vehicles,” a spokesman said. How the rivals reach riders adds another competitive dynamic to the industry. In most of the cities in which it operates, Apollo Go reaches customers through its own app, but in London it has partnered with Uber and Freenow, owned by Lyft. Waymo will operate through its own app, while Wayve has partnered with Uber, which is one of its largest investors. The potential worry for Uber is that robotaxis could cut out ride-hailing services. The company plans to invest $10bn in autonomous vehicles in the coming years to defend its position as the dominant go-to market platform. It has partnered with or invested in more than 30 autonomous vehicle companies worldwide as it seeks to position itself as the single platform for multiple providers. Autonomous vehicles are just one of the many areas where the US and China are battling it out for tech supremacy, and Europe is likely to become an increasingly important market for Chinese companies as the US is effectively closing the market to Chinese autonomous technology from next year. Kelkar said: “Many Chinese players have already shifted their focus away from the US due to regulatory hurdles and the looming ban. Europe, in contrast, currently takes a more open approach, with Chinese robotaxi players already entering or planning to enter markets such as Croatia, Switzerland and Spain.” But Wayve stands as a British tech champion. When the government released the £500m sovereign AI fund, it did so from Wayve’s offices in King’s Cross. Liz Kendall, then the tech minister, credited Wayve with helping to “cement Britain’s place as one of the top three countries for AI”. While the UK remains a distant third behind the US and China across AI broadly, Wayve could yet emerge as a winner in autonomous vehicles. |
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| Author: | Sussex [ Thu Oct 01, 2026 7:07 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Why London has become battleground for self-driving taxi |
All it will take is one or two deaths caused by these things to wipe out their billions in valuations overnight. And mark my words, it will happen. |
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| Author: | heathcote [ Thu Oct 01, 2026 9:36 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Why London has become battleground for self-driving taxi |
That is the reason the electric taxis were removed from London in the eaely 1900s. |
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