Somebody's job now is to sit in a car that does not need them, and nobody has named what happens next

Wayve has been testing on London streets since 2018, which means there are already people in this city whose working day is spent sitting in a car that is driving itself. Later this summer, under the licence granted on Wednesday, some of them will start doing it with paying passengers in the back.

The licence granted on Wednesday sets the terms out plainly. The vehicles do the driving. 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 job description, written by a regulator, in a document about cars.

Consider what those hours are like.

You hold a private hire licence, which took money and time and a medical and a background check. You sit in the driver's seat. You do not drive. You watch a road you are not steering on, in a vehicle that is almost always right, and your entire value lies in the rare moment when it is not. You cannot read. You cannot rest. You cannot do the thing that makes driving bearable for people who do it all day, which is get into the rhythm of it and let the miles go by.

Vigilance without action is a particular kind of work and it is harder than it looks from outside. The better the system gets, the less often you are needed, and the less often you are needed the harder it is to stay ready for the moment you are. That is not a criticism of anybody's attention. It is the shape of the task.

This desk is not going to pretend to know what a shift like that feels like from the inside. Nobody here has done it. What can be said is what the job is for, and the answer is unusual.

Most jobs exist because something needs doing. This one exists because something needs proving. The person in the seat is there so that a regulator can be confident, a public can be reassured, and a system can accumulate the hours it needs to demonstrate that the seat can be empty. Do the job well enough, for long enough, and the job goes.

That is not a trick played on anyone. It is how supervised trials work and it is how they should work. It is genuinely safer than the alternative and the caution behind it is welcome. But it does mean that Britain's newest transport job is one whose success condition is its own removal, and it is worth naming that out loud while there are only fifteen of them.

The international analysis anticipated this. Reporting on the International Transport Forum's 2023 study of transport workforce transition notes that automation creates new roles including fleet operation technicians, safety drivers and specialist software engineers. Safety drivers. The role was foreseen, in an OECD body Britain belongs to, three years ago, and named as one of the new jobs automation brings.

What the same body recommended, then and again this April, was an anticipatory approach: lowering the barriers to reskilling by addressing motivation, capability and access to training, before the transition rather than after it.

Nobody has told the people in those fifteen cars how long the seat lasts. Not the operator, not the regulator, not the department. The licence has no published review point in it. It may well be years. It may be renewed indefinitely. The point is not that the end is near. The point is that the person doing the job cannot plan, because the one fact they would need in order to plan is the one fact nobody has published.

Off the Clock is usually about what people do when the work stops. This week it is about a job that was designed, honestly and for good reasons, to stop.

There are fifteen of these cars. If it goes well, there will be more, and then the question stops being interesting and starts being urgent. Better to ask it at fifteen.