---
title: "Noted on 10 Sep 2026"
author: Marc Roberts
date: 2026-09-10
url: https://www.marcroberts.info/notes/2026-09-10-robotaxis-and-the-missing-car-club-trips/
---

# Noted on 10 Sep 2026

London's first robotaxis started carrying passengers last week. There's a person sitting in the driving seat of every one of them.

Uber and Wayve went live on 3 September with fewer than twenty Ford Mustang Mach-Es, available across London (but not at the airports, because capitalism). Each has a TfL-licensed private hire driver behind the wheel, monitoring the system and ready to take over. More than 140,000 Londoners had opted in through the Uber app before it launched, so the demand is clearly there.

What most coverage skipped is that Parliament has already built the route to removing that person. The government's own guidance is clear — the piloting scheme "enables the use of automated vehicle (AV) technologies without a safety driver on roads in Great Britain" — and the permit regime that passenger services need came into force in May.

Nobody can use it yet, though. The guidance sets no date for applications opening; it asks instead for "significant pre-engagement" with three separate agencies first. Uber and Wayve had hoped to go driverless this year and now aren't expected to before 2027.

So the law was changed in May and, four months on, the thing it authorises still isn't something you can actually apply for.

Compare this launch against the other shared-vehicle number in the city. London's car club fleet went from around 2,800 vehicles to barely 200 in January. CoMoUK surveyed former Zipcar users in May (215 of them) and 85% said their travel plans had been strongly affected. 55% are considering buying or leasing a car, 9% already have. And 19% said the trips they used to make simply don't happen now.

That last one is staggering to me. One fifth of trips no longer happening. Not made differently, not made at all.

By mid-June, boroughs and operators had managed to replace a little over 100 vehicles against the ~2,500 lost.

I want the autonomous version to work, and I've said so before, more than once. But a robotaxi is an expensive way to access a car for an hour, and we already had a cheaper way. It quietly fell over while everyone was watching the hard problem. One of these needs new technology, a mountain of capital, and a permitting system that launched in May and still isn't taking applications. The other needed a parking bay.

A question for those in the industry: will AVs arrives fast enough, and cheap enough, to backfill what the car clubs lost? Or are these two different markets that keep being discussing as though they're one?