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If they can operate in London, they will have really shown that autonomy is working. London is full of two-way roads that are only one car width wide, roads were you can just get stuck and have to fully back out, vehicles entirely blocking roads requiring complex cooperation between drivers to negotiate, etc. And that's not even considering the complex logic of figuring out where you can stop to let someone out.
> If they can operate in London, they will have really shown that autonomy is working
Go back through Waymo’s historic announcements on HN. This is said every time.
Autonomy works. Waymo has solved it. There isn’t yet a number 2, though China has strong candidates. But where you can find Waymo, it works so well that we need to see it in a familiar context to believe it really exists.
It's unclear as to where in London this is being rolled out, but central London traffic is notoriously slow, which may help. But we also don't have the concept of jaywalking - you can cross wherever, whenever and there is quite the cycling infrastructure to deal with.
Your comment is a slight of hand. Yes it "works" but it is an MVP. Everywhere it's rolled out people say yes it drives, but it drives like a rookie that can follow the rules but doesn't have any of the predictive power that every driver who doesn't suck has some of.
Like for example how traffic will often modulate its spacing or time its lane changes to reduce issues with merging or exiting traffic and certain intersections with most traffic doing the same thing become an efficient repetitive cycle, Waymo doesn't "get it".
So it works, in the same way a newly licensed teenager "works". It's no cabbie.
Edit: It's been over a year since I've ridden in one. Good to hear it's potentially better now.
All the existing places Waymo operate are in the US though, as OP says London is very different. Will be interesting to see if they can get it working or not
> This is said every time.
Sure, but in terms of traffic difficulty they've done like level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and now they're jumping to 100! This is different.
It's not the most difficult place to drive (good luck in India, Turkey, southern Italy, etc.), but it's still far more challenging than any American city.
And it needs fundamentally new capabilities like being able to negotiate with other drivers visually and read implicit signals. You can't do it all just by following what the traffic lights say.
Wayve have been working on London streets for some time now. This is from a few months ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHLbuN6R6qg Tesla's video of FSD in London for comparison
Waymo solved San Francisco. Non-trivial, imo. Is London more complex?
Residents of every city claim that they have the craziest drivers or toughest streets to navigate in. London isn't really that materially harder to drive in than San Francisco.
Sure, people always claim "drivers in MY city..."
But I've lived in both places and London is very different than SF. I'd say the UK has better drivers on average (and much more strict licensing requirements), but driving in London is much more challenging due to the tiny roads you have to navigate. There is no road in SF that is as hard to navigate as the average suburban London two-way traffic single car width road with parking on both sides.
An I'm not saying London is "the worst" by any means. It's nothing like driving in Vietnam or India. But it is very different to SF.
That is just nonsense, sorry. San Francisco is a modern layout (grid) and London is an ancient city with road networks based on thoroughfares that are 500+ years old.
It may be true that all major cities have their own quirks, but London has significantly more complexity than San Francisco or any US grid based city with super wide roads.
Also, the US bought into the ‘Car is King’ idea whereas that’s never really been the case in the UK outside of a few places like Birmingham. It’s generally harder to be a driver in the UK.
Whether that causes significant problems for Waymo, who knows? But I am also of the opinion that if it works in London then that’s a pretty powerful tell that they’ve got it right. We’ll, at least for places where drivers generally stick to the rules.
Bahahaha
How do autonomous driverless cars handle the stand off that occurs when two cars meet on a narrow London street and both parties are of the opinion that the other has to back up 50 meters to let them through? Will the car instruct the passenger to get out and do the arm waving and swearing required for the right of way negotiation?
In Los Angeles, it handles it very badly in my experience.
Robo-taxis can decide not to travel through these roads (or to only do it under absolute necessity)
I'm also curious to know if Waymo's are allowed to drop you slightly off from the address you specified -- in which case they can drop you at the next corner.
Why would they handle it? The autonomous car has all the time in the world. If it takes too long, the car can just hit an error condition, terminate the ride, or maybe tell passengers to walk to the end of the street to get into another car. Then it can just ignore its surroundings and wait things out.
These cars get away with being incapable of following police instructions, I don't see why they would need to care about other traffic users.
If the Waymo is occupied or driving to a pickup, waiting indefinitely doesn't seem profit optimal.
There are video examples of Waymos reversing when a narrow road is obstructed.
There are also many examples of Waymos following directions from police and construction workers.
Around Portobello Road you often get some quite impressive jams like that with two busses and about ten cars. If it just stopped in the middle it wouldn't be popular with the permitting folk.
In Waymo's favour the humans often don't do that good a job.
Maybe take a longer route that avoids the narrow street.
I would love to see this navigating central London on a Saturday night. It is a mind draining nightmare.
Also, the small streets which are one car wide, and where one often needs to look far ahead to see whether there's a gap for you to sneak into whilst letting other cars by, will also be good to see handled.
I’ve been to London a lot over the years and I’ve noticed black cabs have changed the last couple years. It used to always be a native Londoner who passed the knowledge and got access to driving black cab. But recently I’ve had some black cabs with immigrants - this would never be the case historically. So I think they all see the writing on the wall here.
The cab drivers are still true londoners who have passed the knowledge.
What has changed is how acceptable it is to be racist on hacker news and conflate native-londoner with whiteness. Or to conflate being being a true londoner with this xenophobic concept of nativeness.
So many of us londoners are non-white with London native parents who are non-white and in London that doesn't get questioned. You can't imagine how much it hurts to have outsiders come and try and tell us we are different and don't belong just because of our skin colour.
Or, like a lot of trade jobs, it simply isn't attractive to a lot of native folks because of the pay and working hours.
Well it was a really hard job to get for decades. Had to know the right people. Was lucrative.
There are a lot more immigrants here than there used to be in general.
I don't think changes to black cabs are anything to do with Waymo. Uber has had an effect though.
> passed the knowledge
That is still the criteria.
Racism
Official blog post rather than the sparse marketing page: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/hello-london-your-waymo-ride-...
note: Waymo typically spends 8-12+ months with safety drivers, before they launch true driverless.
If they can operate in San Francisco, eg North Beach, they can operate in London. Likely they will just avoid narrow roads for a while. But I was very impressed in SF to see that Waymos are quite pushy to enter / cross traffic.
They might so as they did elsewhere like choose few streets and saying they operate driverless in London just for show. I don't think one can take their word until it is done.
Wow I thought this would take at least another decade, given how difficult driving in London is compared to American cities. I will still be really surprised if they can actually make this work
When I visited San Francisco recently the Waymos were really awesome and worked well, but also there's barely any traffic compared to London. The streets are all really wide and you can pretty much just pull over anywhere. Some even just stopped in the middle of the road and I was amazed to see people waiting patiently behind them! London is entirely different.
Still, props for trying. Will be very interesting to watch what happens!
Even in America they've just chosen the easier cities. I would love it if Waymo came to Boston but until it learns to proactively break traffic laws like all the uber drivers I'm not sure it's going to be very competitive :/.
Waymo is coming to DC and London. I assume they'll also be targeting centers of political power throughout the rest of the world. Starting on the West Coast made sense as a technical strategy, but the huge disadvantage is that nationa legislators and regulators don't go there enough. So lots of people can blithely assume that self-driving taxis are a decade away, or that Elon Musk is going to solve it. That's a dangerous business problem. Waymos don't seem possible til you've ridden a few of them, and then they're ordinary.
I keep wondering how far out this technology will be before it becomes stable and measurably successful; nobody dies
Then what? How soon until trucks, ships, etc are now autonomous?
> before it becomes stable and measurably successful; nobody dies
It’s already there for non-freeway driving. (Nobody dying is a perfectionist metric. It’s better than humans.)
What’s limiting it are capital costs. Once Waymo finds a non-Jaguar form factor it can mass manufacture, I imagine this would get rolled out rapidly. (To the extent Tesla has a shot, it’s in its mass manufacturing expertise.)
Ships, like planes, are fairly autonomous today and usually only have a very small crew. There are however multiple good reasons you don't want to have fully autonomous ships. They operate continuously in salt water for long duration away from ports, the maps they have are far from perfect and the sea bottom shift unpredictable, GPS are not always reliable, and broken down ship at sea is a massive safety and environmental risk.
It should not be understated how troublesome sea water is to complex machinery.
With trucks I'd say soon. There are already prototype ones running out of Dallas https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/self-drivi...
Apparently Ukraine's naval drones can continue their missions autonomously if communications are cut.
Why is nobody dies the metric, not "fewer people die than with human drivers"?
Official page with more detail: https://waymo.com/waymo-in-uk
Unoccupied driverless vehicles need taxed. In the same way you have HOV lanes, the inverse should pay.
Quite the opposite IMHO. This helps reduce people who would hypothetically drunk drive on a Saturday evening, which in turn decreases the possibility that someone dies because of that (either the driver or a victim that was just passing / driving by).
Tbh, the sooner we remove the human from the equation, the better. It's scary to think that we allow so many careless people to drive vehicles that can kill people. I'm not talking just about drunk driving, but all the sort of distractions (smartphone, looking somewhere else, ...).
London specifically, AFAIK after midnight has no tube service. This means that Waymo (or whoever takes a similar initiative) actually helps towards creating a public transportation service that is cheaper and even safer than the current one. I'm personally all up for it - don't tax innovation!
What on Earth will you use as a justification for that? We pay taxes for roads, for fuel, and for the cars themselves. The last thing we need is more.
I'd wait till there is actually a problem with them cluttering things before going there.
Anyone want to take bets on how long it takes for Waymo to kill someone?
As in clearly Waymo's fault in a situation that most human drivers would no have killed someone? 10 years.
Waymo vehicles have been involved in fatal accidents, but had no fault in them.
Perfect, this is exactly what an overcrowded ancient megapolis needs - more cars permanently on the roads.
But at least, fewer cars needlessly taking up valuable real estate for parking in high density areas.