🚗Wayve and Uber Launch Self-Driving Rides in London With 15 Ford Mustangs

Your city's roads are about to get a jobs question

Wayve and Uber just put self-driving rides on the road in London, and the safety driver is still in the seat. That's the condition Transport for London set in August when it granted private hire licences to AV operators. Waymo and Baidu are preparing their own London services, and Uber, Pony.ai, and Verne have started testing in Manchester. Why should you care? If you build for ride-hailing, fleet management, or mapping data, the UK is now a live testbed, not a future market. The Institute for Driverless Transport, an independent UK research body, is asking the uncomfortable questions: what happens to driving jobs, what happens if a supplier fails, and whether Britain becomes dependent on a handful of AV providers for key services. The launch itself is small. Wayve is running 15 electric Ford Mustangs with its AI driver and a safety operator aboard. It also demoed a Nissan LEAF using NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion, with sensors and compute built more tightly into the car's design. The research draws on more than 30 conversations with councils, operators, unions, insurers, lawyers, and universities. Watch the questions, not the fleet size. Nobody has clearly named which public bodies should be planning for AV impact or who inside them should own the response.