Fifteen cars have a licence to drive themselves in London, and a licensed human has to sit in each one

Start with what the document says, because the coverage has been running ahead of it.

Wayve's own announcement, published Wednesday, states that Transport for London has granted private hire vehicle licences to a number of its autonomous all-electric Ford Mustang Mach-E vehicles, following inspection against TfL policy and safety standards. That completes what London calls the triple lock: the operator, the driver and the vehicle must all hold licences from the same authority. Uber holds the operator licence. The vehicles now hold theirs.

One detail matters more than it sounds. TfL has confirmed that the vehicles have been licensed as private hire vehicles, not as automated vehicles. This is not an authorisation to be a self-driving car. It is the ordinary licence any minicab needs, granted to cars that happen to drive themselves, with a licensed human in the seat making the arrangement lawful. No passenger has taken one of these trips yet. Uber says a selected few from an interest list will ride later this summer, ahead of a wider launch.

Wayve does not say how many cars. The phrase in the release is "a number of". The figure in circulation, up to fifteen vehicles on a one-year trial, comes from Caroline Russell, who chairs the London Assembly transport committee, not from TfL or from Wayve. This desk has not seen TfL's own record and says so.

Fifteen.

In the week ending 3 May this year there were 105,607 licensed private hire drivers in London. In April there were 15,978 licensed taxi drivers. Fifteen vehicles against a hundred and twenty thousand licensed people is not a labour market event, and anybody presenting it as one is running ahead of the evidence.

What it is instead is a mechanism, licensed for the first time, and mechanisms are worth reading closely.

The private hire trade is not a declining one. Driver numbers peaked at 117,712 in 2016/17, fell to 99,937 by 2021/22, and have since settled a little above 105,000 for four years running. Whatever happens next happens to a workforce that has stopped shrinking.

The taxi trade is a different story and it is not this one. Licensed taxi drivers have gone from nearly 25,000 in 2009/10 to under 16,000 now. The causes are named by the trade itself and none of them is a machine: the Knowledge takes two years or more, and a cab costs what a cab costs. New driver licences fell from 179 in 2020 to 107 last year and 38 so far this year. Just 0.45 per cent of London taxi drivers are under 31. That decline has been running for fifteen years and it would be dishonest to hang it on a robot that arrived on Wednesday.

One reporting caution, raised by the trade rather than by us. A cab licence lasts three years, so a driver who has stopped working can sit in the figures for a year or two afterwards. Licensed driver counts lag the real trade, which means the published numbers flatter it.

Now the clause.

Under the licence, the vehicles do the driving while a trained, TfL-licensed private hire driver remains on board to oversee the trip, provide support, or take over the wheel if needed. That is the arrangement. It is also the only place in this entire story where anyone has written down what happens to a driver.

Wayve's release does not say how long the arrangement lasts. There is no expiry in it, no review point, no trigger. This desk has looked and has not found one, and would welcome being pointed at it.

What is known is the shape of the ladder. Trialling a self-driving vehicle with a safety driver has been legal on any UK road for years. What is new here is carrying paying passengers under private hire rules. Removing the person in the seat is a further step again, requiring a separate authorisation for vehicles with no user in charge, and a further permit on top of that where the service is offered to the public. The human in the seat is not a courtesy. It is the rung the ladder is currently on.

So the honest summary is short. Fifteen cars, one year, a person in every one of them, in a city with a hundred and twenty thousand licensed drivers. Small, real, and the first of its kind. The number that matters is not fifteen. It is the one nobody has published: how long the person stays.