Waymo Crosses the Ocean – CleanTechnica

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Waymo has been on an expansion sprint in the past year, but its latest announcement is one of its biggest ever. The company is bringing its robotaxi service across the Atlantic Ocean to the great city of London. Whether taking passengers to Premier League games, music concerts, Wimbledon, Big Ben, or countless other places, Waymo robotaxis will be exciting, thrilling, and eventually relaxing our friends in London.

Naturally, as with all of Waymo’s expansion announcements, the robotaxi service won’t be launching immediately. It will launch in 2026. I assume the reason Waymo announces these expansions months in advance is because it needs to get its testing and mapping vehicles out on the roads well ahead of time and it doesn’t want too much speculation or commotion around that. Or perhaps the reason is to have time to build up a potential customer base and drum up interest in the service in a focused way. Anyway, back to London….

Rather than relying on a partnership with Uber or Lyft as it has done in recent expansions in the US, Waymo is getting customers to sign up for access to the service via the Waymo app in this case. Though, fleet partner Moove will support the service in The Big Smoke — which continues to do what it can to outgrow that nickname.

“Over the coming months, we’ll lay the groundwork for our service in collaboration with our fleet operations partner Moove, and continue to engage with local and national leaders to secure the necessary permissions for our commercial ride-hailing service in London. In the U.S., the Waymo Driver has already driven over one hundred million fully autonomous miles on public roads and provided more than ten million paid rides,” Waymo writes.

“We’re thrilled to bring the reliability, safety and magic of Waymo to Londoners,” said Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. “Waymo is making roads safer and transportation more accessible where we operate. We’ve demonstrated how to responsibly scale fully autonomous ride-hailing, and we can’t wait to expand the benefits of our technology to the United Kingdom.”

Interestingly, Waymo already has some strong connections to the UK, which I was not aware of and/or didn’t remember. “Waymo has strong ties to the United Kingdom. London and Oxford are home to our first international engineering hubs, which include teams advancing large-scale, closed-loop simulation – a gold standard development method for fully autonomous driving technology. We’re also proud to partner with Jaguar Land Rover, an iconic British brand whose all-electric I-PACEs outfitted with the Waymo Driver are serving hundreds of thousands of fully autonomous rides every week in the U.S., and are currently driving in Tokyo as we expand our international footprint.” Hmm, yes, the Jaguar connection should go over well there!

It seems that the UK may have actually pushed for this expansion. “I’m delighted that Waymo intends to bring their services to London next year, under our proposed piloting scheme,” stated Secretary of State for Transport Heidi Alexander. “Boosting the AV sector will increase accessible transport options alongside bringing jobs, investment, and opportunities to the UK. Cutting edge investment like this will help us deliver our mission to be world-leaders in new technology and spearhead national renewal that delivers real change in our communities.”

With the announcement, Waymo also emphasized again how much its self-driving taxi services seem to help improve road safety, especially for pedestrians. “The data shows Waymo is making roads safer where we operate, with our technology involved in five times fewer injury-causing collisions, and twelve times fewer injury-causing collisions with pedestrians compared to humans. We’re looking forward to offering an additional option that helps Londoners move safely through their city – whether they bike, walk, or hail a Waymo ride – and provides greater independence to those currently underserved by the mobility status quo.”

“Autonomous vehicles, such as Waymo, hold the potential to significantly improve road safety because, quite simply, the human driver is removed,” said James Gibson, Executive Director of Road Safety GB. “The data shows that the Waymo vehicles have performed far safer compared to human drivers across more than 100 million autonomous miles. Rolling out autonomous vehicles in a progressive yet measured way will be the best approach. The road safety profession and wider society should embrace it. It could lead to a future that our vision zero aspirations envision.”

You can learn more and express interest in being a rider here: https://waymo.com/waymo-in-uk