Waymo in London: Sitting in the Car That Could Give Me Back the Road

Special Report

An event report, not a scored review

Before I lost my sight, I drove. Not out of necessity but out of love. I am, and will always be, a petrol head, and handing back the keys was one of the hardest handovers of my life. So when the RNIB invited me to spend an afternoon with Waymo, the company preparing to bring driverless taxis to London, I did not need asking twice.

A note before we begin. This is not a normal Go Anyway article. There is no Challenge Rating and no Community Rubric this time, because I was not scoring a day out; I was invited to a private briefing to look at the technology up close and to listen to the people building it, and the people questioning it. Think of this as a special report. The usual format returns with the next piece.

The Room

The event took place on 7 July at RNIB’s London offices, and around thirty blind and partially sighted people came. You could feel the buzz the moment you arrived. People were genuinely excited to get close to the technology, and just as genuinely worried about what it will mean in practice. Both feelings were in the room all afternoon, often inside the same person. Frequently inside me.

Simon Antrobus, RNIB’s Chief Executive, opened by telling us why we were there: our experience and our knowledge are vital to understanding whether this technology will genuinely include us. He shared two figures that framed everything that followed. Half of blind and partially sighted people say they want to go out more than they currently do, and 51 per cent say they are not able to make the journeys they want to make. Sit with that for a moment. This is not a conversation about gadgets. It is a conversation about half a community staying home.

The Car on the Forecourt

Parked outside was the reason most of us had come: a white Jaguar I-PACE wearing Waymo’s full sensor suite, the distinctive dome on the roof and pods at each corner housing lidar, radar, cameras and microphones. It is left-hand drive, because these are the same vehicles Waymo already runs in the United States, brought over for the London programme. Waymo arrived in the capital last October, spent months mapping the city with humans at the wheel, and since April its cars have been driving themselves around London with trained safety drivers ready to take over. Around a hundred of them are out there right now. The plan, subject to government approval, is to open to riders later this year.

We did not get to ride. The cars are still in testing and passengers are not yet permitted, so the Jaguar stayed exactly where it was. But we did get to climb inside, and I will not pretend that sitting in the back did not do something to me. A screen between the front seats faces the rear cabin, and on it a message: this car is reserved for the next rider. A welcome card sits in the seat pocket. It is all quietly, deliberately ordinary, which is precisely what makes it extraordinary. This is a taxi with nobody driving it, designed to feel like nothing special at all.

One of the safety drivers took our questions. Their job at this stage is to supervise the car as it learns the city and to step in if it needs help. The honest theme of their answers was that London is a different animal from Phoenix or San Francisco: narrower roads, denser traffic, and pedestrians who treat any gap in the traffic as an invitation. A large part of the current work is teaching the car to predict people, especially people crossing wherever they please.

What Waymo Told Us

Nathan Ashley, Waymo’s Public Policy Manager, set out the company’s ambition in a single line: to be the world’s most trusted driver. The scale behind that ambition is genuinely startling. Waymo carried out over fourteen million autonomous trips in 2025 alone, taking it past twenty million lifetime rides, and it now operates across eleven US cities and more than 1,400 square miles, serving over half a million trips every week. London is its first move outside the United States, alongside testing in Tokyo, and it follows the same three-phase pattern used everywhere else: map the city, drive with a safety driver, then remove the safety driver.

Dr Suzy Charman, Executive Director of the Road Safety Foundation, made the argument that stayed with me most. She wants every journey to be safe and to feel safe, and she described a shift in road safety thinking: away from responding to harm and towards designing systems that prevent it. Autonomous vehicles, she explained, can actively manage speed to reduce the energy transferred in a collision, the measure engineers call Delta-V. The point is not only fewer crashes but less harmful ones. She was also refreshingly honest. Mistakes will happen, problems will arise, and improvement has to be continuous. For her, road safety is ultimately about enabling transport for everyone.

The Questions in the Room

Then came the part of the afternoon that mattered most, because it belonged to us. The same questions kept surfacing in different voices around the room. Will it drop me at the right place, or will I step out into a bush? Will a wheelchair user be set down next to a flight of stairs? How will the car know my exact needs? Most people in that room are comfortable with a human driver for a simple reason: you can tell a human what you need, and they can adjust. A machine has to be taught.

Erik Mathies, RNIB’s Policy Lead, put numbers on the mood. Of 181 responses to an RNIB survey, just over half, 53 per cent, said they would prefer a human-driven vehicle, and only 11 per cent said they would prefer a self-driving one, with the rest unsure. Asked whether they would use an autonomous vehicle at all, the answers split almost perfectly into thirds: yes, no, and undecided. That is not hostility. That is a community waiting to be convinced.

Steve Tyler, Director of Assistive Technology at Leonard Cheshire, distilled the advantage into a single line: I can go where I want, when I want. There is, he added, something immensely powerful about being able to summon a vehicle and travel in privacy. His concerns matched the room’s: data, security and safety. Erik was excited about something broader, the prospect of fewer road deaths and safer streets for everybody, though data worried him too. Dr Charman defined success as safe first, then a more inclusive transport system with these vehicles as one key part of it, and she wants transparency about which journeys the cars generate and which they replace, cycling included. Nathan’s hope was the most human of the lot: a technology that brings families and grandparents closer together. His worry was subtler. How do you change the behaviour of the human drivers sharing the road?

What Waymo Has Built for Riders Like Me

A good chunk of the afternoon walked us through the accessibility features already live in the American service, and this is where my inner sceptic softened. Screen reader support runs through the whole app, so a blind rider can navigate it and hear every label and button read aloud. A setting to minimise walking time shortens the walk at pick-up and drop-off, even preventing the need to cross a street, in exchange for a slightly longer ride. If you cannot find the car, you can make it honk its horn or play a melody from your phone. That feature was built for blind users, and Waymo’s own research found sighted riders love it too. They called it universal design benefiting everyone, and for once the phrase felt earned.

The app gives compass-style, turn-by-turn walking directions to the car using visual, audio and haptic cues, announcing the distance and direction as you close in. Inside, verbose audio cues describe key events for riders who cannot see the screen, right down to the car announcing that it is yielding to pedestrians. You can control the cabin temperature, seat position and fan speed from the app, adjust how talkative the in-car announcements are, and use the whole experience in other languages. One slide showed the start screen in German. For wheelchair users, the current answer is more workaround than solution: a setting will send a wheelchair accessible vehicle, but with a human driver.

Where I Stand

I will be straight with you, because that is the whole point of this site. I cannot wait.

The thought of the independence of being in a car on my own is something I have longed for since the day I stopped driving. When this service opens, I intend to be one of the first through the door. I am very aware of the concerns raised in that room, particularly around data, and I genuinely hope they are answered properly rather than waved away. The people asking those questions are right to ask them. But for me, the pull is stronger than the fear.

I love public transport and I will always use it. It is also true that there are journeys it simply cannot do for me, and those are precisely the journeys a car handles without thinking. My quiet hope goes further still: that one day this technology opens the door to private autonomous ownership. A car of my own again. That would not just be convenient. That would be my independence back.

Final Reflection

Go Anyway is built on a distinction. A barrier unnecessarily prevents participation, while a challenge asks for effort and rewards it. For as long as I have been without sight, personal road transport has been a pure barrier. No amount of preparation, resilience or courage puts a person who cannot see safely behind a wheel. What I sat in on 7 July was a serious attempt to dismantle that barrier altogether.

The room was split into thirds, and honestly, that feels right. The technology has not yet earned everyone’s trust, and the questions about drop-off points, data and dignity are the correct price of admission. But the attempt is under way, on our streets, right now. And regular readers will know exactly where I stand on attempts.

All accessibility details in this article were verified against the organiser’s published information at the time of writing. This reflection is based on my personal experience on the day. Individual experiences may vary, and none of the points raised are intended as a judgement of the event itself, but as an honest account of how I navigated it with my own access needs.