London Robotaxis Are Coming and Europe Is Done With Big Tech

The first robotaxi service to launch in London could start with fewer than ten cars on the road. That detail alone tells you everything about how carefully Uber and its partner Wayve are tiptoeing into one of the world's most complex and congested cities.

Uber has opened an interest list inside its app for Londoners who want to be among the first passengers in a Wayve autonomous vehicle. You find it buried in ride preferences under a section called "autonomous vehicles" — not exactly front-page placement, but that feels intentional. This is a soft launch before the soft launch.

Wayve is a British startup, which makes this partnership a rare case of a homegrown company leading a major robotaxi rollout rather than watching an American or Chinese giant swoop in. That matters for the optics, especially in a regulatory environment where local governments are increasingly skeptical of ceding critical infrastructure to foreign players.

Here is the catch though: these rides will not actually be driverless. Current UK regulations require a safety driver behind the wheel, ready to intervene at any moment. Uber and Wayve declined to say when those human backups would be removed, which means the experience will feel less like the future and more like a slightly awkward car ride where the person in front is pretending not to drive.

The pricing structure is smarter than it sounds. Riders on UberX, Uber Electric, or Uber Comfort will pay standard rates with no autonomous vehicle surcharge. That removes one obvious barrier to adoption and lets Wayve gather real passenger data without having to convince people to pay a premium for something they are not sure they trust yet.

The broader context here is significant. The UK has no fully driverless vehicles operating on public roads right now. The government has signaled that fully driverless ridehail pilots could begin from spring 2026, with wider commercial rollouts expected after the Automated Vehicles Act of 2024 fully kicks in during late 2027. Uber and Wayve are essentially positioning themselves to be first in line when those doors open.

They will have competition. Uber has also partnered with Baidu, the Chinese search and AI giant, for London ambitions. And Waymo, the Alphabet-owned robotaxi company that has already racked up millions of driverless miles in the US, has publicly stated its intention to enter the London market too.

What makes London a genuinely hard test case is everything that makes it London. Narrow Victorian-era streets, roundabouts that confuse human drivers, double-decker buses pulling in and out of traffic, and pedestrians who treat red lights as a suggestion. If autonomous vehicles can handle all of that reliably, the rest of the world starts to look a lot more manageable.

For now, the interest list is the product. And the fact that people are signing up before a single driverless mile has been logged commercially says something about where public appetite for this technology actually sits.

The International Criminal Court switching away from Microsoft's technology might be the most quietly dramatic data point in a much bigger story. An institution designed to prosecute war crimes decided its software vendor posed too much of a risk. That tells you the mood in Europe right now.

Since the start of Donald Trump's second term, European governments, companies, universities, and public institutions have been accelerating plans to cut their dependence on American tech platforms. A WIRED analysis catalogued dozens of documented cases, and researchers believe the public examples represent only a fraction of what is actually happening.

The European Parliament has switched its default search engine from Google to Qwant, a French alternative. The French government is rolling out its own open-source office suite called LaSuite, with officials explicitly framing it as a way to break free from American software. A coalition of more than a dozen European tech firms is preparing to launch Euro-Office. Cities across the Netherlands, France, and Germany are migrating away from Microsoft Office and Google Docs.

The infrastructure moves are just as telling. The Dutch government is pulling its code off Microsoft-owned GitHub and into its own repository. Finland reportedly chose not to move election data to Amazon's cloud services. Belgium's domain registry has said it will leave AWS. Even social networking is getting a European alternative, with Eurosky launching as a continent-friendly option built on the same AT Protocol that powers Bluesky.

It would be easy to read all of this as pure anti-Trump sentiment, and that is certainly part of it. But the concerns run deeper and predate the current US administration. European institutions have spent years worrying about the US CLOUD Act and FISA, both of which give American authorities potential access to data stored by US companies regardless of where those servers physically sit. The closer relationship between Big Tech executives and the Trump White House has made those concerns feel less theoretical.

There is also a straightforward strategic argument that has nothing to do with politics. Relying almost entirely on a small number of foreign-owned platforms for government infrastructure, healthcare data, and public communications is a vulnerability that would make any security-conscious policymaker uncomfortable, regardless of who is in the White House.

The European Commission formalized all of this last week with its long-term plan to reduce dependence on US technology, giving institutional weight to what had previously been a collection of individual decisions.

The honest caveat is that Europe is not actually done with American Big Tech, not even close. These are early, often partial migrations. Open-source alternatives frequently lack the polish and interoperability that make Microsoft and Google products genuinely useful at scale. Switching costs are real, and governments are notoriously slow at completing tech transitions they announce with great fanfare.

But the direction of travel is clear. Europe is no longer treating American tech dominance as a permanent condition to be managed. It is treating it as a problem to be solved, and it is starting to spend real money on that project.