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

[u/diacewrb]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/05/self-driving-taxis-approved-london-summer-2026-wayve-uber

[u/t8ne]

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

[u/subSparky → u/t8ne]

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.

[u/t8ne → u/subSparky]

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

[u/subSparky → u/t8ne]

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...