The job of sitting in a car that drives itself has a name, a skill requirement, and one duty nobody mentioned: teaching the machine

On 7 August this paper ran four pieces about the same fifteen cars. Dr Sandoval set out the licence. Edmund Frye took apart the figure of thirty-eight thousand jobs the state has been quoting since 2022, and so did the editor's note. And Jonah Reeve wrote about what it is like to sit in one, in a piece called Somebody's job now is to sit in a car that does not need them, and nobody has named what happens next.

I am going back to it because I have since read the job advert, and it contains something none of us had.

The role has a name. Wayve calls it a Vehicle Safety Operator. It is not a job you walk into. The advert asks for eight years of driving, mainly in Britain, a clean licence, no blameworthy insurance claims in three years, and an advanced driving background, an approved driving instructor or an emergency response driver or similar. There is drug and alcohol testing before you start and while you are there.

Then, among the duties, this. The operator provides real-world driving examples to train the AI before it is tested on public roads.

Read that again. Part of the paid work is to drive well so the machine can learn from it.

And the company improves you at it. The advert offers intensive courses to develop high driving skills, advanced driving and hazard awareness training. The better you drive, the better the lessons.

Jonah described the job as watching, and as proving that the seat can be empty. That is true and it is not the whole of it. The person is also the curriculum.

I have been trying to work out why that lands harder on me than the ordinary version of this story, and I think it is this. We are used to the idea that a machine learns from data somebody once produced, scraped from work done years ago by people who never knew. This is not that. This is a named employer, hiring a named person, at an advertised standard, whose daily task includes demonstrating the skill so the system can acquire it. The transfer is the job.

Two things I want to be careful about, because it would be easy to make this sound worse than the evidence supports.

Wayve does not publish what the role pays. Every figure circulating comes from small numbers of self-reported estimates and none of it is worth printing. What the accounts do show, as Dr Sandoval sets out elsewhere today, is that the company spends about 118,000 pounds per head across everybody. Where this job sits inside that average, nobody has published.

And a person who takes this work is not naive. An advanced driver reading that advert can see what the company is building. They may reasonably conclude that a well-paid job now, with training attached, is worth having whatever it leads to. I would not tell them they are wrong.

But the question Jonah left open has an answer now, and it is not a date.

The Automated Vehicles Act creates a role called the no user-in-charge operator: where a vehicle drives with nobody in the seat, an organisation carries responsibility for spotting problems and responding to them. And section 83 says that where an operator holds a permit, private hire law does not apply. Private hire law is the only reason there is a licensed human in those fifteen cars.

So the seat does not end when the technology is ready. It ends when a permit is granted. The regulations for that were made this spring.

I do not know whether Wayve has applied for one, and nothing I have read says it has. But the route exists, it is open now, and the job at the other end of it already has a title. Wayve was advertising in London this week for someone to build the system that lets one person watch from a desk.

The seat empties. The watching does not stop. It moves indoors, and one person can do more of it at once.