Plans for self-driving taxis announced back in June 2025 seem to be going full steam ahead, with Waymo announcing that their self-driving Robotaxis will hit the roads of London in 2026.

There is a stipulation, though, TfL have not mentioned how these autonomous self-driving private hire vehicles and taxis will be regulated.  From experience, we know that TfL is never the fastest when it comes to announcing and implementing new regulations.   So, this may be where fast new tech becomes slow.  However, as we have seen in the past with companies like Uber started within grey areas of regulation.  Waymo may just go ahead and start offering their Robotaxis as the regulations don’t exist yet and force TfL to work faster.

TfL, along with the Department of Transport and London Councils, have started sharing guidance on what they call CAV’s Connected and Automated Vehicles.   There are also ongoing consultations to figure out how best to regulate driverless private hire vehicles.

All this is pointing towards the direction of autonomous taxis and private hire vehicles becoming the norm in the near future.

We’ve talked about the pros and cons of self-driving private hire vehicles in our previous blog “Self-Driving PHVs on road in 2026”.  We still don’t think that connected and automated vehicles will make a big impact on private hire drivers to begin with.  It may take away the small city centre bookings, which will affect the black taxi trade more than private hire.  For longer journeys, we believe people will feel safer in a normal private hire taxi.

In the long run, having a human driving you around may become a rare thing, but we think there’s at least another decade to go before we see any major shifts.