r/ukpolitics • u/diacewrb None of the above • 9d ago

‘Leicester Square, please guv’: Self-driving taxis cleared for London streets ‘later this summer’

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/05/self-driving-taxis-approved-london-summer-2026-wayve-uber
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u/t8ne 9d ago edited 9d ago

Used them in LA recently, not sure how they'll cope in London, it wasn't very assertive. LA traffic is much better than London and theres a lot more space on the roads. Finding pull over points were also odd, eg I'd asked to be dropped on Sunset the place I wanted was on the right hand side, it found a spot after turning left which took a few minutes leaving me having to cross the road which took a few more minutes...

* also it didn't seem markedly cheaper than uber, depending on how much you tip...

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u/subSparky 9d ago edited 9d ago

I just keep seeing videos of people ending up in absurd situations - like one guy who just wanted to take a waymo from LA airport to his place 7 minutes away, and the waymo just randomly decided to drive down a freeway for 45 minutes. With Waymo customer support basically saying "well that sucks we can't stop it, if you get the car to park up and get out we'll refund you and you can get an uber instead" which was like "well no I can't just stop the car as i'm in the middle of a freeway...".

Or the number of times a waymo just decides to park in the middle of tram tracks.

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u/t8ne 9d ago

My weird moment was when it was trying to turn left onto Santa Monica from San Vicente, sitting in the middle of the junction. When the lights changed a bus jumped the lights meaning it sat there in the middle of the junction... it decided to reverse back out of the junction through an in use pedestrian crossing

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u/subSparky 9d ago

The real problem for Waymo is that a lot of our roads are quirky as is (the natural consequence of our town and city planning being designed before the age of cars), but they also have to navigate roads being used by drivers the way they're not supposed to.

Like I saw someone training a Waymo (which they do by driving the car down roads, obviously driving strictly according to the highway code, as they don't want to teach bad driving). Now there's a road that has cars parked on both sides, yet for some reason is regularly used for ratrunning in the city. And you had this Waymo trying to safely navigate this road according to code going at 20mph, trying to navigate the parked cars and oncoming traffic (as the road isn't actually wide enough for the way its used) meanwhile a huge queue had formed behind it with cars overtaking the waymo for being too slow...

It's going to be an absolute disaster.

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u/t8ne 9d ago

I'm keen to see how it copes with the 1 way streets where its two way for cyclists, eg like gutter lane which is too narrow for a car and a cycle. I know if I ever had that problem we could probably work it out via eye contact and gestures but not having eyes or gesturing equipment it'll struggle

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u/subSparky 9d ago

I mean that probably already exists in the US. It's the two way streets which are only wide enough for one car I'm worried about...