Uber and British start-up Wayve launched their commercial robotaxi service in London on Thursday, although passengers will still have a human supervisor behind the wheel.
“It’s going to be a phased deployment, so we’re going to start off small,” Wendy Lee, head of product at Uber, told AFP, adding that the number of vehicles will be “in the order of dozens to start”.
The rollout makes Wayve the first company to launch a robotaxi service to the public in London, ahead of rivals Waymo, owned by Google-parent Alphabet, and China’s Baidu, which has partnered with Lyft.
Autonomous taxis are already operating in the United States and China, but London is only the second city in Europe to have them, after Zagreb, where Croatian company Verne operates the service using technology from China’s Pony.ai, with a supervisor on board for safety.
During a demonstration in London for AFP on Tuesday, an operator briefly took back control of the vehicle at an intersection near Big Ben.
