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The age-old question from the back of the car feels just as pertinent as a new era of autonomy threatens to dawn: are we nearly there yet? For Britons, long-promised fully driverless cars, the answer is as ever – yes, nearly. But not quite.

A landmark moment on the journey to autonomous driving is, again, just around the corner. This week, Waymo, which successfully runs robotaxis in San Francisco and four other US cities, announced it was bringing its cars to London.

The detail remains scant, but the promise eye-catching: the pioneering Silicon Valley company said it was bringing its fully autonomous service “across the pond, where we intend to offer rides – with no human behind the wheel – in 2026 … We can’t wait to serve Londoners and the city’s millions of visitors next year.”

Those millions may want an Oyster card for the London Underground, just in case. The UK government, intent on luring big tech, in the summer set out plans to speed up the introduction of driverless cars, meaning robotaxis could start operating in regulated public trials as early as spring 2026. But the rules are yet to be fully established, and testing may include a safety driver for some time.

British firm Wayve, in partnership with Uber, has issued the slightly more sober “plan to develop and launch public-road trials of level 4 fully autonomous vehicles in London.”

While Americans sit back and enjoy the autonomous ride, Britain’s winding road to driverless cars has been marked by pledges that vanished like pedestrians in the rain. In 2018, Addison Lee – once the future – was promising, along with Oxford University scientists, to be launching robotaxis by 2021.

A year earlier, Nissan almost managed to get one of its Leaf cars to drive itself around Beckton in east London without crashing. Chris Grayling, then transport secretary, said self-driving cars would be on the market in four years, as little pods tootled autonomously around the O2 in Greenwich. A British invention, a union jack-liveried Sinclair C5-Tardis love child, appeared in a Milton Keynes car park in 2015; then business secretary Vince Cable said 100 of them would soon be carrying passengers round town for £2 a pop.

Yet abroad, particularly in America and parts of China, autonomous taxi services are now very much a reality – meaning Waymo’s arrival appears more significant than previous hype or hope.

In San Francisco, Waymo’s home town, its driverless cars have become a routine part of urban life, humming along the hilly grid of streets at a cautious yet purposeful pace.

Since their full launch in June 2024 they have taken their place alongside the city’s electric scooters and municipal buses. Taking a Waymo has become as much of a must-do tourist experience as riding one of the city’s historic trolley cars.

The Democrat mayor, Daniel Lurie, has encouraged expansion to revitalise downtown areas, where the streets remain inhabited by many homeless people – leading to the jarring juxtaposition of cutting-edge AI-controlled robocars rolling past those in extreme poverty.

With fast spinning cameras on each wing and one on the roof like a police siren, the converted white Jaguar iPace vehicles look like surveillance infrastructure. They are hailed like Uber or Lyft rides from smartphone apps – but the absence of a human in the driver’s seat, and the steering wheel turning under the control of an invisible algorithm, are reminders of the economic ructions they are causing.

In 2010 Uber launched in San Francisco, upending the way taxi drivers were employed and ushering in precarious gig work. Now those Uber drivers are facing a second wave of technological disruption.

According to data cited by the Economist, the number of people employed in San Francisco in taxi firms grew by 7% in 2024; and pay rose by 14%. It quoted David Risher, the chief executive of Lyft, predicted that self-driving taxis “will actually expand the market”.

But not all necessarily feel that way on the frontline. In the Mission district of San Francisco, asked about Waymo, one Uber driver from Venezuela replied: “I think I’ve got about a year left in this job.”

For a customer, to ride in a Waymo is to feel abandoned to the control and power of artificial intelligence. Once hailed via the app, the car pulls up gently, showing the customer’s initials on a digital display on the roof hub. A tap on the app unlocks the car doors; a welcoming voice reminds riders to buckle up. A screen offers a wide menu of music to cruise along to behind the tinted rear windows, in a truly private space.

Tap the “start ride” button on the touch screen and the car pulls confidently away into the streaming traffic. The steering wheel, with its “please keep your hands off” sign, spins like a funfair ghost train ride.

It doesn’t take long to feel comfortable, as it swerves hazards, errs on the side of caution. Screens with scrolling street maps track progress and update the arrival time while the “pull over now” button is a welcome reminder that it is possible to override the original destination instruction, although it will only pull over when safe.

Waymos have prompted a multitude of social reactions. When three stalled in an intersection of a busy nightlife zone in the Marina area last month – apparently confused, lights flashing – revellers whooped with delight and one man executed multiple backflips from the roof of one of them.

In July, a prankster organised people to a dead end street to all order Waymos at the same time simply to create the spectacle of a cluster of 50 of the robocars. In early 2024, when Waymos were in use in more limited numbers, one was smashed, daubed with graffiti and torched during lunar new year celebrations in the Chinatown area.

A similar reception could await driverless taxis here – even if not personally at the hands of black cab drivers. General secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association, Steve McNamara, said: “You see kids hacking Lime bikes – how long before it becomes the latest TikTok craze to surf on the roof of a Waymo?”

McNamara claims to be relaxed: “It’s a solution to a problem we don’t have. These vehicles, that work so well allegedly in San Francisco and LA – London is like nowhere else. I want someone to explain to me how this driverless car is going to go somewhere like Charing Cross Road at 11pmt, where everybody’s just walking across the road. As soon as you see the Lidar dome [sensor] on the top of the Waymo car, you’re just going to step out, or pull out in a car, because you know it’s going to stop.”

Christian Wolmar, the author of Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere, concurs: “We do not have jaywalking rules here – and if Google expects that we’re going to introduce jaywalking rules for the sake of their cars …”

Despite the US experience, he remains resolutely sceptical that fully driverless taxis will appear here next year: “Without a human operator, absolutely zero chance.”

Waymo, which announced its London plans partly to pre-empt sightings of test cars on the streets beginning the long mapping process, is feeling confident after some 100m miles of autonomous journeys in San Francisco – a city far from flat and orderly – and trials in a dozen more.

Operators have long maintained that regulation, rather than technology, is the challenge. Even fast-tracking has its limits: the results of a consultation that closed last month should – although not confirmed – allow the pilots to go ahead.

That may have been the trigger for Waymo, but it still needs to jump through a number of Department for Transport and Transport for London hoops to get the test scheme motoring – and the wider legislation will not be in place for at least two more years. Insurers, in particular, say many questions remain about liability.

Similar pre-legislative pilot schemes have left other novel transport forms in limbo: e-scooter “trials” are now set to last eight years. Tony Travers, the LSE professor of government, believes driverless cars have a better chance: “They have to obey the rules. They could lead to congestion – but not the near-anarchy that the e-scooters have caused.”

But even if driverless taxis appear, the wider question, Wolmar says, is, “so what?”

According to the Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana, the answer is in the cars “reliability, safety and magic”, with a big emphasis on safety. Waymo cars to date have been involved in a fraction of the incidents of human-driven cars over the same distance.

It also hopes to bring a different form of autonomy to those who may have lacked it: the Royal National Institute of Blind People welcomed Waymo’s news as a dawn of “technology that can safely enable spontaneous autonomous travel”.

Waymo said its entry into the UK market would mean investing in depots, charging infrastructure, and cleaning and support teams, and “human specialists” in the driving seat for now.

Heidi Alexander, the transport secretary, has said the impending autonomous vehicle revolution could create 38,000 UK jobs.

But more evidently at risk are professional drivers: 300,000 or so who are licensed for private hire – and, further down the line, another million in HGVs and delivery. Many of Britain’s 82,000 bus drivers have recently won significant pay rises; and the 27,000 train drivers are famously well heeled.

Little wonder that polling suggests public opinion in the UK is barely positive about driverless cars, in a backdrop of general anxiety over the potential for artificial intelligence to eliminate human jobs, if not yet humans.

The licensing and legislation awaits. McNamara is upbeat: “Who’s going to sign it off? If I was looking for a successful career in politics I wouldn’t be putting my name on that piece of paper.”