For almost a decade, London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has sought to reduce car use — expanding the city’s congestion charge, promoting cycling and limiting rises in bus fares. But the capital has remained one of Europe’s most congested cities, with drivers spending 91 hours in traffic last year, according to analysts Inrix. Now Transport for London, the city’s transport authority, has identified a new challenge: the introduction of autonomous vehicles.

Earlier this year, it raised concerns about how robotaxis would fit in with Khan’s aim for 80 per cent of journeys to be made by cycling, walking or public transport by 2041. "It is really important that we get [the rollout of robotaxis] right so that we can see it complement our ability to reach that target rather than undermine it," Christina Calderato, TfL’s director of strategy, told the London Assembly’s transport committee in July. Robotaxi operators, which are hoping to start services in London by early 2027, have emphasised their small scale. Waymo, owned by Alphabet, parent company of Google, said its test fleet was below 100 vehicles and its approach was to "grow gradually." "If we were given an operating licence, I suspect that we would be operating in the low hundreds of vehicles compared to the 120,000 taxi and private hire vehicle drivers that there are in London," Waymo’s head of policy for UK and Europe Ben Loewenstein told the London Assembly in June.

Wayve, a British start-up backed by Uber, also said it would start with "a small number of vehicles" to ensure any increase in congestion would be minimal. Siddartha Khastgir, head of safe autonomy at the University of Warwick, estimated that robotaxi numbers could reach between 500 and 1,000 within five years of their initial rollout. He said the UK’s Home Office and the Department for Transport were working to train emergency services to respond to similar incidents.

All of the robotaxis to be deployed in London will have remote support from UK-based humans to respond when the vehicles malfunction or get stuck.