London's first robotaxi still has a licensed driver in the front seat

The first useful picture of London's new robotaxi service is not the press car parked outside a Georgian terrace. It is ITV's camera, stuck in a right-turn queue, watching a Ford Mustang Mach-E hesitate while a lorry bears down. "Oh, he's put his hand on the wheel. He's put his hand on the wheel," the reporter says, as the safety operator does the one job the brochure would rather skip.

That was Thursday, the day Uber put Wayve's supervised autonomous rides into the London app. The cars are all-electric Mach-Es. They cost the same as a normal UberX, Uber Electric or Uber Comfort trip. You can decline the match and wait for a human. More than 140,000 Londoners have already opted in. Fifteen of the cars are licensed.

Fifteen, in a city with more than 100,000 private-hire vehicles. Autocar did the unkind arithmetic: the odds of being allocated one, out of the capital's 100,000 Ubers, are slim. The launch is real. It is also a rounding error with a touchscreen.

ITV rode with Casey Fischer of Wayve, who walked through the app the way a product manager walks through a demo kitchen: matched with an autonomous vehicle, three minutes away. At the kerb, the rider verifies the car and taps unlock. Fischer's reason for that tap was practical rather than futuristic — it stops anyone else driving off in your car, and stops you climbing into somebody else's.

Then the car moves. Fischer, paraphrasing the company's pitch on camera, said Wayve's vehicles learn to drive like a person: they make judgement calls and trade-offs instead of following a rigid "I see X, I do Y" script, because London streets are not that formulaic. Wayve chief executive Alex Kendall, talking to France 24, put numbers on the city's awkwardness: "London is a 2,000-year-old city, so you've got, you know, 20 times more roadworks than you have in San Francisco, and you've got 10 times more cyclists and pedestrians, and you've got, you know, traffic lights, merging, roundabouts, all of these things." The software has to be adaptable, or it sits in a bus lane apologising.

The Verge noted the hardware bet underneath that language. Wayve's AV2.0 stack uses cameras and radar and no lidar, and Uber says there is no geofence. Rides can run across London except airports. That is a different product from the mapped, fenced robotaxi services that have spent years learning a few American neighbourhoods. It is also why the person in the front seat still has a steering wheel.

Transport for London licensed the cars as private hire vehicles last month. The licence still requires a trained, TfL-badged operator onboard. The Guardian's Gwyn Topham took a short Westminster ride with Kendall and watched the car stop in front of gates other vehicles were trying to use, then pull away and re-park. "That was quite human-like — really cool," Kendall said. He also said the technology was "still maturing" and declined to date a launch without the safety driver: "I don't want to put a timeline on it, but we're pushing as fast as we can."

Fully driverless operation needs a separate sign-off from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency. Reporting in late August treated that as unlikely this year. Uber's global head of autonomous mobility, Sarfraz Maredia, told the Guardian the consumer pitch is safety and, later, price. "Today, nobody's able to operate AVs cheaper than a traditional human-driven ride, so that's going to take a while to prove." He has been hearing from drivers who are not panicking yet. One common line, he said: "Hey, I drive in this city and it's very complex, and I don't think this product is going to be able to compete with me anytime soon."

David McMullen of the GMB union is less relaxed. "With hundreds of thousands of people employed to drive every day, we need to be really careful with the rollout of driverless cars unless we are prepared to see unprecedented levels of social and economic disruption." Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander called Thursday "a major milestone for the future of transport in London" and a showcase for British technology. Both can be true in the same week. Fifteen cars do not rewrite a labour market. They do start the argument in public, on a fare the passenger already understands.

London is not Uber's first European robotaxi. The company already runs a supervised service in Zagreb with a different partner. Autocar says London is the first of 12 cities on the Wayve-Uber map, with Tokyo due later this year in modified Nissan Leafs. Uber itself still talks about a hybrid network in which human drivers and AVs share the app, and about being "the largest facilitator of AV trips in the world" by 2029.

Waymo has been testing Jaguar I-Paces in London and had aimed at a September start of its own. Residents on one east London street complained about a Waymo car getting stuck at night and reversing with a loud warning siren; Autocar reported the firm had to reprogram routes. Lyft and Baidu are working a smaller patch in Brent. The race Uber won on Thursday is the race to put a paid, public, supervised ride in the same app Londoners already open for a Tesco run.

ITV's gridlock clip is the honest souvenir. Wayve called the operator's intervention proof the safety model works. Cab drivers called it proof the software is not ready. For now the car still has a person who can grab the wheel, a fare that matches the human one, and a fleet you could lose in a single NCP. That is a launch. It is not a takeover of Leicester Square.