Waymo driverless taxis are coming to London in 2026

Waymo, the ride-hailing company owned by Alphabet (Google's parent company), has announced plans to bring its autonomous taxi service to London. The company currently operates in a collection of US cities including San Francisco and Los Angeles, and has recently expanded to Tokyo.

Waymo is centred on a driverless system that's best known for using the Jaguar I-Pace as its core vehicle, loaded with sensors and using detailed maps of the areas that it operates in. Knowing the maps allows precision so it's not just dependent on GPS, while the sensors gather data to ensure a safe drive.

Those sensors are a combination of lidar, cameras, radar and massive computing power to process all the information that's gathered. Waymo says that its driver system is safer than human drivers, while it gathers that data and learns from the process, so Waymo also says that it's a really experienced driver.

Bringing Waymo to London is likely to encounter challenges that it might not found on US roads, which are typically wider, and it will be interesting to see how the system reacts when it discovers a bottleneck down a narrow London sideroad where Friday lunchtime drinkers have roamed off the pavement and are standing in the streets.

Waymo claims to have already provided over one hundred million rides on public roads. To get a Waymo, Londoners will have to download the Waymo ride-hailing app and in some areas (Austin and Atlanta), it's integrated into the Uber app too. Once you've hailed your ride using the app and put in your destination, you wait for it to arrive, jump in and then tap "Start Ride" on the screen to get going.

That's going to potentially avoid cab drivers who "aren't going in that direction", but at the same time, it means you're not going to be able to talk about the performance of your football team or the state of modern politics with the driver in front.

Waymo vehicles will be taking to the streets of London to start gathering data, to make sure that the technology works and any quirks that come from London roads are taken into account. There's no firm date for when you'll actually be able to ride in a Waymo, but you can sign-up for more information.

Waymo's link to the UK runs a little deeper than it just being a target country for expansion: there are engineering hubs in London and Oxford and of course, with Coventry-based Jaguar providing the underlying vehicle for the service, it's like Waymo is coming home.

The Jaguar I-Pace offers just under 300 miles of electric driving range according to official stats, and was one of the early pioneers of electric cars. It was launched in 2018 and struck a chord with drivers because of its bespoke electric design, rather than using an existing Jaguar and converting it to electric.

The Jaguar I-Pace, however, has been discontinued, with Jaguar taking some time out to reimagine itself as a brand. We're expecting Jaguar to reemerge with a model based on to Jaguar Type 00 concept soon, with production expected in 2026.

That will see Waymo using other models, with the Hyundai Ioniq 5 in development, alongside the Zeekr RT offering a larger van option.

James Gibson, Executive Director of Road Safety GB, said "Autonomous vehicles, such as Waymo, hold the potential to significantly improve road safety because, quite simply, the human driver is removed."