Waymo is bringing autonomous, driverless ride-hailing to London in 2026
77 comments
·October 16, 2025spacedgrey
michelsedgh
In Los Angeles, it handles it very badly in my experience.
whiplash451
Robo-taxis can decide not to travel through these roads (or to only do it under absolute necessity)
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.
Thorrez
>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.
n4r9
I live in London and have visited and driven in LA. London has more narrow streets. Many, many more.
michelsedgh
Yes but thats a hack, the issue that it can’t handle those situations is still there and in my experience the car behind me was a waymo that kept trying to center but as soon as it saw cars coming it swerved. It kept going left and right. Unsafe in that situation and scared for people who were coming its way.
jeroenhd
Why would they handle it? The autonomous car has all the time in the world. If it takes too long, the car can just hit an error condition, terminate the ride, or maybe tell passengers to walk to the end of the street to get into another car. Then it can just ignore its surroundings and wait things out.
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.
tim333
Around Portobello Road you often get some quite impressive jams like that with two busses and about ten cars. If it just stopped in the middle it wouldn't be popular with the permitting folk.
In Waymo's favour the humans often don't do that good a job.
xnx
If the Waymo is occupied or driving to a pickup, waiting indefinitely doesn't seem profit optimal.
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.
bitshiftfaced
Maybe take a longer route that avoids the narrow street.
ageitgey
If they can operate in London, they will have really shown that autonomy is working. London is full of two-way roads that are only one car width wide, roads were you can just get stuck and have to fully back out, vehicles entirely blocking roads requiring complex cooperation between drivers to negotiate, etc. And that's not even considering the complex logic of figuring out where you can stop to let someone out.
JumpCrisscross
> If they can operate in London, they will have really shown that autonomy is working
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.
4ndrewl
It's unclear as to where in London this is being rolled out, but central London traffic is notoriously slow, which may help. But we also don't have the concept of jaywalking - you can cross wherever, whenever and there is quite the cycling infrastructure to deal with.
xnx
The linked article is bad. It would've been better to link to the official announcement or page (https://waymo.com/waymo-in-uk):
"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."
JumpCrisscross
> we also don't have the concept of jaywalking - you can cross wherever, whenever and there is quite the cycling infrastructure to deal with
This is true in New York and, to a lesser degree, San Francisco.
potato3732842
Your comment is a slight of hand. Yes it "works" but it is an MVP. Everywhere it's rolled out people say yes it drives, but it drives like a rookie that can follow the rules but doesn't have any of the predictive power that every driver who doesn't suck has some of.
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.
sixhobbits
After taking both Uber and Waymo in San Francisco I think I disagree with this. Only caught a few so maybe I didn't see the bad sides, but from what I saw it was able to predict flows and navigate far more smoothly than humans in many situations. Really comfortable and overall safe feeling ride.
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.
JumpCrisscross
> Everywhere it's rolled out people say yes it drives, but it drives like a rookie
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.
ifwinterco
All the existing places Waymo operate are in the US though, as OP says London is very different. Will be interesting to see if they can get it working or not
AlotOfReading
They've been operating in Tokyo for a bit now.
IshKebab
> This is said every time.
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.
xnx
> it needs fundamentally new capabilities like being able to negotiate with other drivers visually and read implicit signal
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?
leprechaun1066
Wayve have been working on London streets for some time now. This is from a few months ago:
finolex1
Residents of every city claim that they have the craziest drivers or toughest streets to navigate in. London isn't really that materially harder to drive in than San Francisco.
ageitgey
Sure, people always claim "drivers in MY city..."
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.
tim333
Driving in London is kind of weird these days in that you feel almost stationary. It's typically wait at lights for 2 min, drive at 15-20 mph for 40 seconds, repeat. I've mostly given up on it and use an ebike instead.
louthy
That is just nonsense, sorry. San Francisco is a modern layout (grid) and London is an ancient city with road networks based on thoroughfares that are 500+ years old.
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.
mavhc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHLbuN6R6qg Tesla's video of FSD in London for comparison
m101
I would love to see this navigating central London on a Saturday night. It is a mind draining nightmare.
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.
librasteve
If they can operate in San Francisco, eg North Beach, they can operate in London. Likely they will just avoid narrow roads for a while. But I was very impressed in SF to see that Waymos are quite pushy to enter / cross traffic.
xnx
Official page with more detail: https://waymo.com/waymo-in-uk
asah
note: Waymo typically spends 8-12+ months with safety drivers, before they launch true driverless.
ChrisArchitect
Official blog post rather than the sparse marketing page: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/hello-london-your-waymo-ride-...
Yizahi
Perfect, this is exactly what an overcrowded ancient megapolis needs - more cars permanently on the roads.
morcus
But at least, fewer cars needlessly taking up valuable real estate for parking in high density areas.
josefritzishere
Anyone want to take bets on how long it takes for Waymo to kill someone?
xnx
As in clearly Waymo's fault in a situation that most human drivers would no have killed someone? 10 years.
Waymo vehicles have been involved in fatal accidents, but had no fault in them.
nowaymo6237
Unoccupied driverless vehicles need taxed. In the same way you have HOV lanes, the inverse should pay.
denysvitali
Quite the opposite IMHO. This helps reduce people who would hypothetically drunk drive on a Saturday evening, which in turn decreases the possibility that someone dies because of that (either the driver or a victim that was just passing / driving by).
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!
lm28469
> This helps reduce people who would hypothetically drunk drive on a Saturday evening
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.
lowdownbutter
> London specifically, AFAIK after midnight has no tube service
If only such things were googleable.
badgersnake
London has public transport all night, including the tube at weekends:
tim333
I'd wait till there is actually a problem with them cluttering things before going there.
Reubend
What on Earth will you use as a justification for that? We pay taxes for roads, for fuel, and for the cars themselves. The last thing we need is more.
pastage
One argument would be that a driver in a cab will pay tax, a robot taxi will pay a lot less. That is quite a lot of money that is funneled to private companies instead of being used to improve our infrastructure.
xnx
Should we put 2 drivers in each cab so that more taxes will be paid?
throawayonthe
roads are functionally subsidized by non-motorists
IshKebab
Wow I thought this would take at least another decade, given how difficult driving in London is compared to American cities. I will still be really surprised if they can actually make this work
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!
ghc
Even in America they've just chosen the easier cities. I would love it if Waymo came to Boston but until it learns to proactively break traffic laws like all the uber drivers I'm not sure it's going to be very competitive :/.
xnx
> I'm not sure it's going to be very competitive
Uber may be faster by driving dangerously, but Waymo has advantages in safety, privacy, cleanliness, no tipping, etc.
matthewdgreen
Waymo is coming to DC and London. I assume they'll also be targeting centers of political power throughout the rest of the world. Starting on the West Coast made sense as a technical strategy, but the huge disadvantage is that nationa legislators and regulators don't go there enough. So lots of people can blithely assume that self-driving taxis are a decade away, or that Elon Musk is going to solve it. That's a dangerous business problem. Waymos don't seem possible til you've ridden a few of them, and then they're ordinary.
nemo44x
I’ve been to London a lot over the years and I’ve noticed black cabs have changed the last couple years. It used to always be a native Londoner who passed the knowledge and got access to driving black cab. But recently I’ve had some black cabs with immigrants - this would never be the case historically. So I think they all see the writing on the wall here.
maroon_unperson
The cab drivers are still true londoners who have passed the knowledge.
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.
tim333
There are a lot more immigrants here than there used to be in general.
I don't think changes to black cabs are anything to do with Waymo. Uber has had an effect though.
mschild
Or, like a lot of trade jobs, it simply isn't attractive to a lot of native folks because of the pay and working hours.
nemo44x
Well it was a really hard job to get for decades. Had to know the right people. Was lucrative.
badgersnake
> passed the knowledge
That is still the criteria.
nemo44x
I think they’ve really let up on it recently. Have had a few rides where the driver was clueless and had to punch it into a GPS. Never happened to me previously.
hiddencost
Racism
How do autonomous driverless cars handle the stand off that occurs when two cars meet on a narrow London street and both parties are of the opinion that the other has to back up 50 meters to let them through? Will the car instruct the passenger to get out and do the arm waving and swearing required for the right of way negotiation?