Waymo's Robotaxis Are Coming to London

wired.com

25 points·standardUser··6 comments

> its first international service could be Waymo's biggest challenge yet

Waymo have been testing/operating in Tokyo for about half a year now, so this would actually be their second international territory.

Fortune have a somewhat better writeup - https://fortune.com/2025/10/15/waymo-expand-europe-london-la...

Wayve (1) are driving similar test vehicles in London

Apparently they're not affiliated with Waymo, rather they are a competitor (2)

1) https://wayve.ai/

2) https://techfundingnews.com/wayve-2-billion-microsoft-softba...

Official post: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/hello-london-your-waymo-ride-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45590470)

I wonder how much engineering was needed to adapt to driving on the left side of the road.

I imagine that for some things you just flip a switch, but for anything neural there could be learned associations where certain objects or events are more common on certain sides of the road. I guess that Tesla would he more effected by that given their end-to-end neural architecture.

Maybe you can get lucky by mirroring the situation left-to-right. Certainly the hardest part of driving on the left isn’t being on the “wrong” side of the road but being on the “wrong” side of the car.

As a human driver I've never had much problem with the left right thing but a lot of road rules and conventions are different. That's always been trickier going from the UK to Paris or the US.

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