London's Robotaxi Launch Slips. Waymo, Wayve and Baidu Are Waiting on a Document.

London was supposed to be Europe's answer to Phoenix. Instead, three of the world's best-funded autonomous driving companies are sitting in the capital with cars on the road and no way to turn the meter on — because Transport for London has not published the document telling them how to ask.

Financial Times reporting, matched by the Guardian on 26 August, confirms an open secret in the AV industry: fully driverless commercial robotaxi service in London is now unlikely to begin in 2026. Waymo, Uber-backed Wayve and China's Baidu are pushing against the same bottleneck. The TfL guidance operators need before they can file for consent has not appeared, and no vehicle has been approved by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency under the new automated passenger services permit regime that makes driverless commercial operation legal at all.

The gap between announcement and asphalt is stark. On 5 August, TfL granted 15 private hire vehicle licences to Ford Mustang Mach-E cars running Wayve's AI Driver software, completing the triple lock in which operator, driver and vehicle all hold licences from the same authority. Uber and Wayve said trips would begin "later this summer" for an interest list that drew more than 100,000 Londoners in eight weeks. Summer is nearly over. Those first rides, when they come, will have a TfL-licensed human driver in the seat under the government's AV Trialling Code of Practice, not a driverless permit.

The Document Everyone Is Waiting For

The blockage traces to Part 5 of the Automated Vehicles Act 2024, which created the automated passenger services permit — the mechanism allowing a company to carry paying passengers with no safety driver aboard. The government laid the Automated Vehicles (Permits for Automated Passenger Services) Regulations 2026 on 23 April. But a national permit is only half the picture. In London an operator also needs consent from TfL as local licensing authority, and TfL has not told anyone what that consent requires.

Christina Calderato, TfL's director of strategy, told the London Assembly's transport committee last month that the authority would not be in a position to accept applications "for some time."

"I do not think we are in a rush to get [the guidelines] out," Calderato said. "There is a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes."

That reads oddly against the government's own timeline. In June 2025, transport secretary Heidi Alexander pulled forward the schedule for commercial self-driving pilots by a full year, to spring 2026. "The future of transport is arriving," Alexander said, pitching it as a route to jobs and investment. The DfT's supporting case projected 38,000 jobs and a £42bn industry by 2035, with full implementation of the AV Act in the second half of 2027.

Spring 2026 came and went. Ben Loewenstein, Waymo's head of policy and government affairs for the UK and Europe, told the FT that Waymo is "working through the safety approval process" with the DfT and is waiting on TfL's guidance to seek consent. He said the company is still working toward a fully autonomous London service "by the end of this year" — but declined to say whether that would mean paid rides for the general public.

Wayve chief executive Alex Kendall declined to reaffirm any 2026 driverless date. "I don't want to put a timeline on it because we want to make sure we pass through [the regulatory process]," he told the FT. "This work is continuing at pace. London is a significant step up in complexity compared to Phoenix or San Francisco."

There is a hardware dimension too. For its driverless launch Wayve intends to switch from the Mach-E to a new Nissan Leaf platform not due until later this year, so even a cleared regulatory path runs into a vehicle that does not yet exist in fleet quantities. Baidu only began testing on London streets at the end of July and is targeting public rides in 2027.

Why It Matters

The delay is not really about London traffic. It is about who sets the clock on autonomy, and the UK has just demonstrated that the answer is a local licensing authority with no statutory deadline.

The competitive context makes that costly. Robotaxis now carry passengers in more than 20 cities across the US, China and the Middle East, mostly under regimes where a state DMV or municipal transport bureau issues permits against published criteria. Europe has been slower by design, and London's stall is dragging the continent's flagship market. Zagreb, of all places, became the first European city to offer autonomous rides to the public earlier this month via Uber — still with a human onboard for monitoring.

Waymo is voting with its expansion budget. On 25 August, a day before the London delay was reported, it announced commercial service in Munich toward the end of 2027, making Germany its first EU market. Munich is Waymo's third international city after London and Tokyo — and it now has a firmer public date there than in the capital where it has tested longer.

For Wayve, the stakes are national. Britain's flagship AV company, backed by SoftBank, Nvidia, Microsoft and Uber, signed a June partnership with Stellantis and Uber to scale Level 4 robotaxis globally. If its home city cannot clear a path, its centre of gravity shifts to markets that can — precisely what the DfT's 2025 acceleration was meant to prevent.

What To Watch

Three signals will tell you whether 2027 holds. Whether TfL publishes its operator guidance before year end. Whether the DVSA issues its first automated passenger services permit to any vehicle from any company — the count today is zero, and the first approval will reveal how demanding the bar actually is. And whether Uber and Wayve get supervised pilots running this autumn, generating the London operating data regulators say they need.

The government still expects broader self-driving deployment from 2027, after testing and local approvals. That is now a statement about paperwork, not technology.