Londoners are able to hail the UK’s first robotaxis – as Uber today becomes the first company to launch a self-driving minicab.
Initially, it only has 15 autonomous vehicles with a licence to operate in the city, and each one must have a human safety driver behind the wheel ready to take control if anything goes wrong.
Uber said it surveyed London-based customers via the app and more than 100,000 said they would choose a self-driving taxi if one was available, despite incidents of driverless rides malfunctioning in US cities where they already operate.
As I found out when I became the first UK journalist to hail one, it was mostly smooth but the safety driver did intervene on one occasion.
At the moment the UK fare for a robotaxi ride will be the same fare as a standard UberX, Uber Electric, or Uber Comfort journey, with upfront fares shown in the app.
Taking a self-driving ride will only appear as an option in the app after the journey has been booked, and if one of its cars is available nearby.
Uber’s global head of autonomous mobility and delivery Sarfraz Maredia said the plan was to phase them in over a period of several years.
“We always want consumers to be able to request a human ride or an autonomous vehicle, and because the market’s growing, we expect that there will be human drivers on Uber London for a long time to come,” he said.
The Ford Mustang electric vehicles which make up Uber’s current small fleet are fitted with the UK tech firm Wayve’s driverless car technology, which uses AI to analyse data about what is going on around it in real time, gathered by sensors in a bar on the roof of the vehicle and elsewhere.
The vehicles are not pre-programmed – their actions are determined on the spot depending on what is going on.
Google’s autonomous car company Waymo and the Chinese tech giant Baidu are also vying to launch services in the UK, and the competition is fierce.
Wayve chief executive Alex Kendall described developing the technology as “the space race for our generation” but added there were some “really hard problems to solve” along the way.
“What we’ve done over time is pioneer a completely new approach to autonomous driving, making it possible to bring this to a busy and complex city like London and scale it globally,” he said.