"When will the first ride-hailing trip with no human in the driver's seat take place in London, under an APS permit?"
Resolves to the date of the first publicly confirmed trip where:
A member of the public (non-employee of the operator) books and rides in a road vehicle on a public road within the Greater London Authority boundary
No human is in the vehicle to monitor the vehicle i.e. no safety drivers or safety attendants
The trip is a point-to-point ride-hailing service
The operator holds a valid APS permit granted by the Secretary of State under Part 5 of the Automated Vehicles Act 2024
Remote monitoring is permitted, what matters is no human physically in the vehicle controlling it
Free promotional rides count, as long as the service is operating under an APS permit and bookable by members of the public. Waitlist access counts.
Resolves based on official operator announcements, DfT/Secretary of State confirmation, or credible national media reports (BBC, Reuters, Guardian, Financial Times).
If no such trip has occurred by 1st July 2027, resolves later than June 2027.
1,000People are also trading
Extra weird in central London what with:
• Chaotically full of people.
• Traffic can be really slow at first, then stop for a long time, then go back to really slow again, on a repeating cycle.
• Excellent underground train network and other public transport.
• Any embarrassing goofy behaviour is going to be extremely spectated.
Question: Does the advantage of additional thinking time due to slow traffic flow outweigh the disadvantage of extra environmental complexity?
@AlanTennant "any embarrassing goofy behaviour is going to be extremely spectated" -> Totally agree.
The other points don't necessarily stop an autonomous vehicle operator from starting services. We have seen successful autonomous vehicle service deployments in China, which is famously more crowded and has lots of cases with more chaotic traffic.
Some context for traders:
Waymo announced in January 2026 that it's targeting a commercial driverless ride-hailing service in London by September 2026, with a passenger pilot starting as early as April. They currently have ~24 vehicles mapping London streets with safety drivers.
They're not the only ones. Wayve (a British startup backed by Microsoft and Nvidia) is partnering with Uber and has been doing supervised test drives in London, they've said they want to launch in 2026 through a partnership with Uber but haven't given a firm date.
Baidu's Apollo Go announced in December 2025 that it would enter London through both Uber and Lyft, with testing expected in H1 2026, 'pending regulatory approval', there's been silence since.
The regulatory bottleneck: None of this can happen without an 'APS permit'. The Automated Vehicles Act 2024 created a new permitting scheme for "automated passenger services" (APS). This creates the legal mechanism that allows companies to carry passengers without a human driver. The current Labour government fast-tracked this to spring 2026 (originally planned for 2027). Until at least one APS permit is granted by the Secretary of State, no operator can legally offer driverless rides to the public.
So this market is really a bet on: (1) how fast the government processes the regulations and grants the first permit, and (2) how quickly an operator is ready to go once they have it. Waymo seems most likely to be first, but the regulatory timeline is the main source of uncertainty.