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A Waymo autonomous vehicle drives along Masonic Avenue on April 11, 2022 in San Francisco, California. San Francisco is serving as testing grounds for autonomous vehicles with Waymo, a Google subsidiary and Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, logging millions of test miles throughout San Francisco in 2021. (Photo by Justin Sullivan\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
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Waymo is on a hiring spree in London, suggesting Google’s driverless car project is heading to the UK \u2014 not much of a surprise given the government plans to enable self-driving trials next year. <\/p>\n
In June, the UK government said<\/a> it aimed to allow driverless cars to be tested without safety drivers and take passengers in London by Spring 2026 ahead of potential launch of robo-taxi services the following year; Uber immediately announced a partnership with British autonomous firm Wayve for London pilot. <\/p>\n Over the weekend, The Telegraph reported<\/a> that Waymo had begun advertising for staff in London, including a \u201cfleet readiness lead\u201d and various engineers.<\/p>\n A company spokesperson didn’t confirm any plans to the newspaper, but said it was continuing to hire and invest in Britain and had always planned to expand globally. Google had yet to respond to a request for confirmation at the time of publishing.<\/p>\n So far, Waymo\u2019s global efforts have been limited to a small trial in Tokyo, Japan. Instead, Waymo has methodically added American cities<\/a> to its roster \u2014 including recent announcements for Nashville and San Francisco’s airport. <\/p>\n Waymo\u2019s UK hiring spree <\/p>\n Waymo has seven jobs listed on its website that are based in London, suggesting a local rollout is on the books though the UK could also be evolving into Waymo\u2019s base for international trials, too. <\/p>\n The job applications all note this: “Waymo Operations exists to deliver the Waymo Driver to the world. We are a global team building and scaling the world’s first and leading autonomous fleet and operations platform.”<\/p>\n Close-up of LIDAR with Waymo logo atop a Waymo self driving car, San Francisco, California, March 18, 2025. (Photo by Smith Collection\/Gado\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n Gado via Getty Images<\/p>\n Currently, Waymo has a team in Oxford, but one of the listings suggests plans to expand the work to London. In a job posting<\/a> for a machine learning engineer in simulation, Waymo notes: \u201cWe are planning to set up a team in London UK to work with the teams in MTV [Mountain View] and Oxford to build these foundation models out and to integrate them into several evaluation and training products.\u201d<\/p>\n The jobs listed<\/a> include Fleet Readiness Lead, Incident Response Manager, and Machine Learning Engineers in AI foundations, simulation, and machine learning infrastructure. Salaries range from \u00a372,000 to \u00a3162,000. <\/p>\n Students, this one\u2019s for you: Waymo is also looking for a summer intern<\/a> in machine learning and simulation for next summer \u2014 right when these trials could be starting. <\/p>\n Can a Waymo car work in London? <\/p>\n Waymo\u2019s city-by-city rollout is a test of the cars’ generalisability, referring to how easily the cars could be dropped into a new city with different driving patterns and laws without major retraining or adjustments. If the cars can’t adapt easily, each new location will take time and come with high costs, potentially impacting the scalability of driverless cars<\/a> \u2014 a fact that’s true for all driverless companies. <\/p>\n That makes Uber\u2019s Wayve partnership a smart move: the latter company is British, and its car has grown up on local roads. <\/p>\n Saswat Panigrahi, Vice President, Strategy, Product Management & Data Science at Waymo, speaks onstage at TC Sessions: Mobility on May 19, 2022 in San Mateo, California. (Photo by Kimberly White\/Getty Images for TechCrunch)<\/p>\n Getty Images for TechCrunch<\/p>\n Waymo has just one international trial at the moment, in Tokyo, Japan \u2014 but Waymo\u2019s chief product officer Saswat Panigrahi said in a recent interview<\/a> that the technology was “generalising well”. <\/p>\n “Think about when you go to a new city or country,” Panigrahi said. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to relearn the entire task of driving; you just need a little bit of reorientation. That\u2019s also true of our technology. Domestic launches\u2014from Los Angeles to Austin and Atlanta\u2014are getting faster, and we\u2019re generalising well. That gives us confidence that when we go international, we\u2019ll have an autonomous driver that\u2019s fundamentally safe.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, it remains to be seen if anyone even wants robotaxis in London, with a recent survey suggesting half of Americans have no plans to take a ride in a driverless taxi<\/a>. Waymo has been the target of protests<\/a>; back when Uber launched in London, taxi drivers shut down parts of the city in opposition<\/a>. <\/p>\n That said, the general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers\u2019 Association, Steve McNamara, told the Guardian<\/a> in June that the rise of robotaxis wasn\u2019t a concern to black-cab drivers in London: \u201cThey are living in fantasy land. We\u2019re probably going to have flying taxis before we have autonomous ones in London\u2026 I\u2019m genuinely not worried. Come back to me in 2040.\u201d<\/p>\n Waymo not alone in planning London robotaxi services <\/p>\n It would be no surprise that Waymo is planning to join the growing group of companies planning trials in the UK next year, even though the government is only set to allow \u201csmall scale\u201d services in 2026, ahead of a wider launch in 2027. <\/p>\n In July, Tesla posted a series of videos showing a car \u2014 with a safety driver, as is required under current laws \u2014 enabled with “Full Self-Driving” software making its way through London<\/a> and Swindon\u2019s “Magic Roundabout”<\/a>. <\/p>\n In August, Chinese-owned Baidu said<\/a> it was working with ride-hailing firm Lyft to start tests of its Apollo Go cars next year in the UK and Germany. <\/p>\n Transport Secretary Mark Harper having a ride in a self-driving car being tested by automated driving company Wayve in Westminster. Picture date: Wednesday November 8, 2023. (Photo by Stefan Rousseau\/PA Images via Getty Images)<\/p>\n PA Images via Getty Images<\/p>\n And immediately after the government announcement in June, Uber said it was working with Cambridge self-driving startup Wayve on a trial for next year. The Level-4 cars will be controlled by Wayve\u2019s AV2.0 system, which the company says learns “from experience like a human driver” \u2014 avoiding “generalisability” challenges.<\/p>\n Alex Kendall, CEO and Co-founder of Wayve, said<\/a> at the time: \u201cWe drove through Tokyo, Milan, and Montana\u2014all with the same AI model. That\u2019s the power of AV2.0. It\u2019s what gives us the confidence to launch a driverless ride-hailing service with Uber, starting in London and expanding to other cities around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Wayve has posted plenty of videos showing its cars navigating the capital \u2014 and Swindon\u2019s bonkers multipart-part roundabout<\/a> \u2014 again with a safety driver at the wheel.<\/p>\n