Waymo Is Bringing Autonomous, Driverless Ride-Hailing to London in 2026
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Waymo plans to bring autonomous ride-hailing to London in 2026, sparking debate about the feasibility and implications of self-driving cars in complex urban environments.
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Go back through Waymo’s historic announcements on HN. This is said every time.
Autonomy works. Waymo has solved it. There isn’t yet a number 2, though China has strong candidates. But where you can find Waymo, it works so well that we need to see it in a familiar context to believe it really exists.
This is true in New York and, to a lesser degree, San Francisco.
However unlike a cop deciding whether to fine people for "jay walking" the Waymo doesn't care whether you're the mayor's grandmother or a wise-talking black teenager if you're in its path, those are both humans and it's not allowed to hit humans.
There aren't going to be many humans in the street in outer Phoenix because where would they even be going? But the Mission, just like Leicester Square, has plenty of pedestrians who might just run into the street in front of you given any reason or opportunity and you need to be ready for that.
So I agree this isn't novel for Waymo, but while technically jay walking is now legal in NYC that's not why Waymo (which also has pencilled in an NYC launch) needs to care about it already.
"select boroughs in London, including Barking and Dagenham, Brent, Camden, Ealing, Royal Borough of Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Haringey, Islington, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Lambeth, Lewisham, Newham, Redbridge, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth, City of Westminster, and the City of London."
Like for example how traffic will often modulate its spacing or time its lane changes to reduce issues with merging or exiting traffic and certain intersections with most traffic doing the same thing become an efficient repetitive cycle, Waymo doesn't "get it".
So it works, in the same way a newly licensed teenager "works". It's no cabbie.
Edit: It's been over a year since I've ridden in one. Good to hear it's potentially better now.
I think you just made this up. Almost every anecdote I've heard, and I spend a lot of time in two cities where it's launched, is that "it drives better than most humans". Which is exactly how I would characterize it too. It doesn't drive exactly like a human. But for every subtle human behavior it doesn't do, there are probably several things it does much more skillfully than a human.
When did you last update this hypothesis?
The Waymos I’ve been in creep, honk and modulate their aggressiveness quite naturally. In the cities they operate in, they’re a premium product to cabs.
The part where you’re right is on freeways. But my point is that tends to be ignored when folks gatekeep “real” autonomy. Instead, it’s some random peculiarity of their city which humans traverse at low speeds. Exactly the thing Waymo has mastered.
It's different than human drivers for sure, but to me at least it's better.
I agree with MVP part, my understanding is that there's still a lot of Wizard of Oz stuff in terms of regularly mapping and remapping its routes and having a lot of human operators remotely checking and maybe controlling the fleet, but I'm impressed personally.
Sure, but in terms of traffic difficulty they've done like level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and now they're jumping to 100! This is different.
It's not the most difficult place to drive (good luck in India, Turkey, southern Italy, etc.), but it's still far more challenging than any American city.
And it needs fundamentally new capabilities like being able to negotiate with other drivers visually and read implicit signals. You can't do it all just by following what the traffic lights say.
This is also important in the US and is a capability the Waymo Driver has.
> it's still far more challenging than any American city.
How would you rate the difficult of London vs. Boston?
——
°Which makes it more fun: I love driving in London, but I'm a weirdo. My biggest regret about my last / first visit to Delhi is that I let my wife talk me out of driving. It may indeed have been a prudent choice, but I think I was there long enough to "get" enough to manage next time.
But I've lived in both places and London is very different than SF. I'd say the UK has better drivers on average (and much more strict licensing requirements), but driving in London is much more challenging due to the tiny roads you have to navigate. There is no road in SF that is as hard to navigate as the average suburban London two-way traffic single car width road with parking on both sides.
An I'm not saying London is "the worst" by any means. It's nothing like driving in Vietnam or India. But it is very different to SF.
I think you just described the entire Bernal Heights neighborhood in SF (except with 20+ degree steepness on top of that).
It may be true that all major cities have their own quirks, but London has significantly more complexity than San Francisco or any US grid based city with super wide roads.
Also, the US bought into the ‘Car is King’ idea whereas that’s never really been the case in the UK outside of a few places like Birmingham. It’s generally harder to be a driver in the UK.
Whether that causes significant problems for Waymo, who knows? But I am also of the opinion that if it works in London then that’s a pretty powerful tell that they’ve got it right. We’ll, at least for places where drivers generally stick to the rules.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvctCbVEvwQ
Tbh, the sooner we remove the human from the equation, the better. It's scary to think that we allow so many careless people to drive vehicles that can kill people. I'm not talking just about drunk driving, but all the sort of distractions (smartphone, looking somewhere else, ...).
London specifically, AFAIK after midnight has no tube service. This means that Waymo (or whoever takes a similar initiative) actually helps towards creating a public transportation service that is cheaper and even safer than the current one. I'm personally all up for it - don't tax innovation!
This was solved by taxis, and now uber, decades ago. If you're dumb enough to drive under influence in 2025 the cure isn't a driverless taxi it's 10 years in jail.
It's definitely not a cure, but removing the human factor (aside from the intoxication part) is anyways a very good goal IMHO.
Oh and btw, I've seen also taxi / uber drivers that were under the influence of alcohol / cocaine. Humans are the problem.
If only such things were googleable.
As another comment pointed out, there are a few lines open during the night on weekends, and there are buses.
https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/tube/night-tube
When I visited San Francisco recently the Waymos were really awesome and worked well, but also there's barely any traffic compared to London. The streets are all really wide and you can pretty much just pull over anywhere. Some even just stopped in the middle of the road and I was amazed to see people waiting patiently behind them! London is entirely different.
Still, props for trying. Will be very interesting to watch what happens!
Uber may be faster by driving dangerously, but Waymo has advantages in safety, privacy, cleanliness, no tipping, etc.
Then what? How soon until trucks, ships, etc are now autonomous?
It’s already there for non-freeway driving. (Nobody dying is a perfectionist metric. It’s better than humans.)
What’s limiting it are capital costs. Once Waymo finds a non-Jaguar form factor it can mass manufacture, I imagine this would get rolled out rapidly. (To the extent Tesla has a shot, it’s in its mass manufacturing expertise.)
Granted, Chinese EVs can be half the price, and there isn't any competition at Google's heels, forcing them to rush. But still.
Yes. Google, better than many others, gets scaling economics.
(And the cost is likely $100+ thousand per vehicle, after sensors and compute, with costs rising rapidly if you try and order too many too fast due to supply-chain bottlenecks nobody has bothered optimizing yet.)
Unless they're planning 20mph golf carts to save on long-distance sensors, which as far as I know they aren't.
IMHO it's more likely they have capacity constraints because of all the different parts involved in a roll-out; you can't just double the capacity of a production facility without hiring lots of inexperienced new hires, meaning they can only build the things so fast. You can't roll out to a new city without places to park the cars, and places to charge them, and people to repair them, and places to store the spare parts, and trade routes to replenish the spare parts, and so on.
Sure. But they may not have decided precisely what mix they need where, yet. More importantly, those suppliers may not have invested in factories that can produce millions of Waymos a year.
I would have naively thought it would be easier, since it's much easier as a human.
Per minute I reckon the cognitive load of driving on even a busy motorway is less than half that of driving in central london
“Stopping in lane becomes much more dangerous with the possibility of a rear-end collision at high speed. All stopping should be planned well in advance, ideally exiting at the next ramp, or at least driving to the closest shoulder with enough room to park.
This greatly increases the scope of edge cases that need to be handled autonomously and at freeway speeds.
…
The features that make freeways simpler — controlled access, no intersections, one-way traffic — also make ‘interesting’ events more rare. This is a double-edged sword. While the simpler environment reduces the number of software features to be developed, it also increases the iteration time and cost.
During development, ‘interesting’ events are needed to train data-hungry ML models. For validation, each new software version to be qualified for driverless operation needs to encounter a minimum number of ‘interesting’ events before comparisons to a human safety level can have statistical significance. Overall, iteration becomes more expensive when it takes more vehicle-hours to collect each event.”
https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-ri...
The "interesting" interventions that happen on the highway are exclusively caused by the driver tailgating.
I would love to see the business model Waymo had for their Zeekr vehicles before tariffs blew up their plans.
Also, the same event (e.g. someone dying in a car crash) doesn't always have the same responsibilities behind it. If I kill someone by driving recklessly, I have more responsibility than if I kill someone when a bird crashes on my windshield. There are extreme cases where someone bears full responsibility, and extreme cases where an accident is just an accident and nobody is responsible. It may be that with self driving, a larger percentage of cases lean on the "true accident" side. (It's just an idea though, I agree there's an important question here that merits careful consideration.)
If the car cause an accident because it fails to spot something, do you pass it on 'mechanical error'? Because in my country that would mean the code has to be audited, like every X kilometers a mechanic has to 'audit' my car to prevent mechanical failures, and take on the responsibility if something breaks and it kills someone.
I think Waymo won't accept code audits, so the company has to take on the responsibility if a car kills someone. The only way to be sure it ends well is if Waymo is 100% sure their cars can't cause any accidents.
If standard is zero accidents then you can't accept a solution that yield's a 50% or 80% reduction.
It should not be understated how troublesome sea water is to complex machinery.
Apparently Ukraine's naval drones can continue their missions autonomously if communications are cut.
That is still the criteria.
I don't think changes to black cabs are anything to do with Waymo. Uber has had an effect though.
What has changed is how acceptable it is to be racist on hacker news and conflate native-londoner with whiteness. Or to conflate being being a true londoner with this xenophobic concept of nativeness.
So many of us londoners are non-white with London native parents who are non-white and in London that doesn't get questioned. You can't imagine how much it hurts to have outsiders come and try and tell us we are different and don't belong just because of our skin colour.
I'm also curious to know if Waymo's are allowed to drop you slightly off from the address you specified -- in which case they can drop you at the next corner.
Yes, they do.
>Tell us where you want to go
>Choose your destination and we’ll select the safest spots to pick you up and drop you off.
https://waymo.com/rides/
These cars get away with being incapable of following police instructions, I don't see why they would need to care about other traffic users.
In Waymo's favour the humans often don't do that good a job.
There are video examples of Waymos reversing when a narrow road is obstructed.
There are also many examples of Waymos following directions from police and construction workers.
I do agree that this fleet will slightly alleviate parking issue for people sporadically taking cars, not regularly. But at the cost of more congestion on the roads, especially in the already congested city centers, since that will be overwhelming majority of trip start or end points.
Just about everyone who commutes from zone 2-5 into central London will be better served by continuing to use the bus, tube, overground, tram, light rail, and national rail systems just as they do now.
The only exceptions will be people with specific mobility needs (usually requiring an adapted vehicle), security requirements (senior govt ministers, royalty, foreign dignitaries of one sort or another), or who need their vehicle for work. None of those groups will be well-served by Waymo, so they'll continue to have to put up with using private vehicles.
Where it will be useful is for one-off journeys. Coming home after a night out, especially if it's in the wee hours when you might otherwise have to wait 20 minutes for public transport. Going to/from hospital. Getting to the airport with luggage for an early flight. Going clubbing when you're not wearing very much and it's raining heavily outside.
There are plenty of situations like that when people are happy to pay £20 more and put up with a longer journey, but for most people it'll be a few times a month rather than a daily occurrence.
Waymo vehicles have been involved in fatal accidents, but had no fault in them.
Also, the small streets which are one car wide, and where one often needs to look far ahead to see whether there's a gap for you to sneak into whilst letting other cars by, will also be good to see handled.