According to online reports, Waymo self-driving cars have been seen test-driving on the roads of London.

Waymo LLC, formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company.

“We’re thrilled to bring the reliability, safety and magic of Waymo to Londoners,” said Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana.

For the past few years, the company has operated about 1,500 driverless cars across the US. Their safety record so far has been good. The vehicles have not been involved in the sort of life-threatening situations that would turn public opinion against them, but they have got into all sorts of scrapes that are annoying for a city’s day-to-day operation – impeding emergency services, causing traffic jams and, in one case, running over a much-loved San Francisco cat.

The company has stated that by the end of 2026, Londoners will be able to take a ride with no human driver behind the wheel. Their core promise? These vehicles won't get tired, drunk, or distracted, potentially increasing road safety and efficiency for everyone. Furthermore, they suggest that as the technology matures, a driverless ride could become cheaper than a traditional taxi.

The potential benefits for a city like London are genuinely compelling. Imagine a late-night journey home for young women, made without a moment's anxiety about the person behind the wheel. Tourists could navigate the city with fare transparency, free from price surges due to language barriers or unfamiliar routes. Even simple conveniences emerge, like not needing to book special transport for a pet.

On the surface, it sounds like progress for everyone.

However, the big question remains: how much of this accumulated US experience is relevant as the cars launch in London?

The context here is fundamentally different. London’s streets are a historical maze—narrow, chaotically shared, and designed long before the modern car. Here, the pedestrian holds more sway; jaywalking is not an infraction but an accepted norm, a fact London police reluctantly acknowledged after a brief, failed crackdown in 1966.

Another issue is that London has been extremely successful in reducing the number of cars in its centre while increasing the number of buses and bicycles, exemplified by plans to close Oxford Street to traffic.

If self-driving cars pull people away from active travel and public transport, they hinder rather than help the city’s wider transport strategy.

Whether this will become the seamless next chapter in urban mobility, or an ambitious experiment that fails to read the road ahead, will depend not only on the technology, but on how well it learns to move to London’s unique rhythm.