Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving ride-hailing company, is officially headed to Europe.
The company announced on Wednesday that it is planning to start offering paid robotaxi rides in London next year, and said that its Jaguar I-Pace vehicles will start making their rounds—with safety drivers behind the wheel—along the London streets “in the coming weeks” as the company gears up for launching service.
London will become the second city outside the U.S. in Waymo’s international expansion, with testing in Tokyo having begun in April. In London, Waymo says, it will partner with Moove, a mobility solutions company that Waymo is already working with in Phoenix and Miami, for fleet operations to handle things like charging infrastructure and cleaning vehicles. In the U.S., Waymo has worked with several partners, including Lyft, Uber, and Avis to handle some of the operational work.
It will take some time for Waymo to be able to fully ramp up commercial operations in the U.K., as the country is still in the process of developing guidelines and refining permitting processes for self-driving car companies. Waymo is one of a few companies participating in the U.K’s AV trial program. Autonomous driving companies will be able to run small-scale autonomous pilots with passengers beginning in spring 2026. While the U.K. Department for Transport has said it has “fast-tracked” these pilots so they could start next year, a potential larger-scale rollout will not happen until the Automated Vehicles Act is fully implemented in the second half of 2027. Thus far, even British autonomous software startups like Wayve and Oxa haven’t been allowed to conduct fully autonomous testing—without safety drivers or remote supervision—on public roads.
While it is taking longer for self-driving companies to start operating in the U.K., Waymo will be a first mover in the market once the requirements are finalized, and it plans to build on the scale it’s starting to attain in the U.S. The Alphabet subsidiary is now operating commercially in five American cities, with plans to launch in several more. Waymo has conducted more than 10 million paid rides in the U.S., and has driven more than 100 million fully autonomous miles on public roads—putting it far ahead of competition like Amazon-owned Zoox or Tesla, which have both been running limited, small-scale pilots or service in select cities.
