The third time we have written about these fifteen cars, and the first time we have had a question worth asking

We have written about the Wayve cars twice. On 7 August, when Transport for London granted the licences, and on 21 August, when Elena had read the job advert and found a duty in it that nobody had mentioned. If you read either, you already know the numbers: fifteen cars against 105,607 licensed private hire drivers in London, and a projection of 38,000 jobs that turns out to come from a 2022 command paper about a shortage of lorry drivers.

None of that is today. On Thursday the cars started carrying paying passengers, and a different question opened up.

How often does the person in the driver's seat have to take over?

Everything follows from that. If the answer is almost never, the seat is a formality and the trade has a few years. If it is often, the technology is further away than the launch suggested. It is the single number that would tell 105,607 people something useful about the next decade of their working lives.

Nobody is collecting it.

Leah has what exists, which is two journalists writing up their first ride, and what California has required from every permit holder every January since 2015. Ines has why: these were licensed as minicabs, under rules with no concept of a machine handing back, and the Act that would ask does not apply until a permit exists that nobody will date.

And Jonah has found a man who does the job, saying what it has become. He was quoted in February. We wrote about this job twice without him, both times noting that nobody in the coverage had spoken to anyone doing it. Somebody had. We had not looked.

That is the second time in three editions this paper has corrected itself in public, and I want to say what I think about that rather than let it become a habit nobody examines.

I do not think it is a virtue. It is what happens when you publish daily on a subject that moves faster than one person can read. The corrections are the cost of the pace, not evidence of character, and if they stop being uncomfortable that will be the moment to worry. What would trouble me more is a week where we found nothing to correct, because it would mean we had stopped looking hard enough at our own work.

THE PLAYBOOK. If you are told a new technology is being trialled, three questions worth asking before you form a view. What exactly is being measured, and by whom. Who is required to publish it, and what happens if they do not. And which set of rules is it operating under, because that determines both of the above and it is rarely the set of rules you would expect. In this case a minicab licence is doing the work, and a minicab licence was never designed to notice a car driving itself.

— M.

This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.