Uber opens a London waitlist for Wayve robotaxis as the UK’s driverless race kicks off

London’s robotaxi era is starting with a sign-up form. Uber has opened a waitlist for Londoners who want to ride in a self-driving car, the clearest sign yet that driverless taxis are about to reach the capital’s streets.

The rides will be powered by Wayve, the London-based self-driving startup, under a partnership in which Uber owns and operates the fleet while Wayve supplies the “AI Driver” that does the actual driving. The waitlist, reported by Bloomberg, opens ahead of a commercial trial the two companies have said will begin in London in 2026.

The timing is not an accident.

Britain has accelerated its rules for commercial self-driving pilots, with the Department for Transport bringing forward a permitting regime that allows driverless taxi and bus services to run without a safety driver onboard.

Uber and Wayve plan to deploy SAE Level 4 vehicles, the level at which a car can handle everything within a defined area without human intervention.

Wayve is one of Europe’s most valuable AI startups, having raised $1.2bn last year in a round it has since extended, with backers including Uber, SoftBank, Nvidia, and most recently AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm. Its pitch is a more general, learning-based approach to autonomy than the heavily mapped systems used by some rivals, an idea its Cambridge-trained founders were once told would never work.

It will not have London to itself.

Waymo, Alphabet’s robotaxi unit, plans to launch a passenger service in the city by the third quarter of 2026, and has signalled its cars may carry no driver from the start. Uber, for its part, is hedging across partners and cities, having already lined up robotaxi efforts with Wayve and Nissan in Tokyo and WeRide in Madrid.

Not everyone is enthusiastic. London’s black-cab drivers, whose “Knowledge” of the city’s streets has been a barrier to entry for more than a century, are sceptical of cars that learned to drive from data. Their worry is the one facing taxi drivers wherever robotaxis arrive: that an algorithm willing to work around the clock changes the economics of the job overnight.

For Uber, the waitlist is also a demand signal, and a marketing one. The company said autonomous trips grew tenfold year on year in its most recent quarter, and London is among its most valuable markets. Whether riders embrace a steering wheel that turns itself, on streets famous for confounding newcomers, is the test that starts now.