As Waymo and Wayve prepare to launch their driverless fleets on the streets of London, the business traveller is about to be sold a frictionless future. Before hailing it, consider what is quietly being switched off.
There is a moment, somewhere between the Limehouse Link and Tower Hill, when a London cabbie earns his fare. Mine, on a wet Tuesday at the end of April, did it without looking up from the road.
“Don’t bother with the Connaught for lunch, guv, they’ve had a change in the kitchen and it’s not what it was. Try Quo Vadis instead. I’ll have you there in twelve minutes if I cut up through Soho.”
He was right on both counts. He also knew that the lobby of the building I was visiting was hosting a livery dinner that evening and warned me, apropos of nothing, that the Embankment would be shut from six because of a march. Total elapsed cost: £18.40. Total value to my afternoon: incalculable.
This is the unwritten line item on every London expenses claim. It is also, if you believe the technology industry, about to be made obsolete.
Sometime between this issue going to press and the August bank holiday, Waymo intends to begin charging fares for driverless rides in London, the first non-American city in which the Alphabet-owned company has hung out its shingle. A fleet of around a hundred Jaguar I-Pace SUVs, each fitted with twenty-nine cameras, six radars and five lidar sensors, has been quietly mapping a hundred-square-mile zone of the capital since the spring. A pilot service for invited passengers began in April; commercial app-hailing is pencilled in for September. Wayve, the British startup backed by Nvidia and Microsoft, is on the next starting block; Uber is on the one beyond. All are waiting on the government’s promised update to the Automated Vehicles Act, expected in the second half of the year.
For the business traveller, the proposition is seductive. No driver to tip. No partition to lean through. A guaranteed quiet ride between Paddington and Mayfair in which to make the call you should have made before boarding the train. Tekedra Mawakana, Waymo’s co-chief executive, calls it “the chance to take care of all of those things and let the Waymo Driver safely get you from point A to point B.” Her company points to its data: five times safer than a human driver, more than two million fleet-miles every week, what she describes as “the most experienced driver in the world”.
It is a tidy pitch. It also misunderstands what a London cab is for.
The numbers, briefly, look bad for the cabbie. According to Transport for London, just 15,978 drivers held a Green Badge in April, the lowest figure since 1975, and a long way down from the 2013/14 peak of 25,538. The pass rate for the Knowledge of London, that famously merciless oral examination first introduced for horse-drawn drivers in 1865, has slumped from 59 per cent in 2020 to 38 per cent in 2025. Two in three trainees never make it to a badge. Tom Scullion, who has been driving cabs for thirty-four years and who took me through Limehouse that Tuesday, knows what is coming. “We are the icons of London,” he said. “But the youngsters can earn more on Uber tomorrow than I’ll earn in a fortnight.”
The Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association sets out the cultural balance sheet in its recent report, Saving the Black Cab. Black cabs, it points out, are the only taxi service in any major world city that is one hundred per cent wheelchair-accessible. They are the only vehicles in central London licensed to ply for hire on the street, the only ones, in other words, that can be physically hailed in the rain. Around six in ten of them are now LEVC TXs, the Coventry-built, zero-emission-capable hybrid that has already cut the nitrogen-oxide output of the entire fleet by 59 per cent. None of these things are accidents. All of them are vulnerable.
This is the part of the story that the robotaxi pitch glosses over. Steven Fairbrass, an aspiring cabbie I met at the TfL examination hall on his twentieth attempt at the Knowledge, put it to me bluntly. “Imagine you’re trying to hail a vehicle with no driver in it. You’re standing there in the rain, and it just drives straight past you, because it hasn’t got a sensor or a human brain or an eye to turn.” The Waymo, for all its twenty-nine cameras, will not see your raised arm. It is not coming to you. It is coming to your app, having priced the ride dynamically against eight other passengers in EC2. A passing cab, by contrast, has a yellow light, a partition window and an obligation, codified in the Hackney Carriage Act of 1831, to take you by the shortest legal route.
Then there is the Knowledge itself, the thing that turns a driver into a concierge. A celebrated 2000 study by Professor Eleanor Maguire at University College London found that licensed cabbies had a measurably larger posterior hippocampus than the rest of us, with the difference growing the longer they had been driving. The Knowledge is not a quaint bit of pageantry. It is a neurological re-wiring exercise that produces, at the end of three to seven years’ study, a human who has internalised every shortcut, every one-way reversal, every restaurant, hotel and livery hall within six miles of Charing Cross. Since February of last year TfL has narrowed the syllabus to a defined 6,000-point list, making the exam fairer rather than easier, and applications have crept back up: 742 new candidates in the year to November, a rise of nearly 69 per cent on 2022. The trade is bleeding, but it is not yet beaten.
For a business traveller, the value of that wiring shows up in small, unbillable moments. The cabbie who tells you a client’s office has moved two streets over because he heard it from the building manager last week. The driver who clocks that your guest uses a wheelchair and slides the ramp out without being asked. The veteran who, when the protest you didn’t know about closes Whitehall, takes you the back way through Great Scotland Yard and gets you to the meeting on time. Waymo will get faster. Waymo will not get curious.
None of which is to argue that the algorithm has no place. Waymo’s safety record in Phoenix and San Francisco is, on the published numbers, better than that of a tired human in a rented Toyota. Wayve’s chief executive, Alex Kendall, makes the credible case that an AI trained on millions of hours of global driving will adapt more deftly to a temporary diversion than a satnav reading from an out-of-date map. Both will likely be cheaper than a black cab at four in the morning, when no cabbie wants to take you to Heathrow Terminal Five. The point is not that the new technology should be refused entry. It is that the corporate travel programmes hurrying to welcome it should not, in the same gesture, let the old one wither.
Here, I would offer a small, heretical proposal. Most large London employers already operate tiered ground-transport policies: rail and Tube reimbursed for the everyday, ride-hailing apps for the in-between, executive cars at the top. There is room, in the 2027 redraft, for a Knowledge Premium tier, a modest surcharge that books a Green Badge driver in preference to a robotaxi for client pick-ups, late-night airport runs, journeys flagged for accessibility, and any pick-up of a guest from somewhere they have not visited before. Travel managers already pay a premium for an airline lounge. They should be willing to pay one for a driver who knows that the rear entrance to the Cabinet Office is on Horse Guards Road, not Whitehall, and who can spell the name of the restaurant the chairman is being taken to.
There is a duty-of-care argument tucked inside this, too. Last year a Waymo in Los Angeles drove through an active police scene; another illegally passed a stopped school bus; both prompted a software recall and a federal investigation. None of which makes the technology unsafe. All of which makes it the sort of thing that should be specified by name, in writing, in a corporate travel policy, not adopted by default because it appeared, one Tuesday, as the cheapest option in an app. The Global Business Travel Association’s 2025 review noted, obliquely, that the duty-of-care category is now projected to be worth £170 billion globally by decade’s end. London will be its most-watched test bed.
This week, while writing this piece, I watched Anshu Moorjani finish his Knowledge. It had taken him five years and forty-one appearances. The examiner did not congratulate him so much as quietly nod. Moorjani will now collect his badge, choose a TX from one of the rental fleets and begin work as one of the youngest Green Badges in town. Sometime in September, while he is still learning where the new restaurants are, a fleet of driverless Jaguars will start collecting paying passengers from the same kerbs.
It is tempting, in business travel as in everything else, to assume that the future is whatever Silicon Valley has decided to ship next. Tempting, but lazy. London has, in its black cabs, one of the most accessible, most knowledgeable, most useful concierge services in the world, included, free, in the meter price. We are about to discover what it costs to let it go. And, more importantly, what it costs not to.
