We said this number had been repeated four times. We had undercounted

Three times in a fortnight this paper has written about fifteen driverless cars in London. Today is not about the cars.

It is about the number attached to them, and about a correction to our own arithmetic.

We have written before that the government's projection of thirty-eight thousand jobs from self-driving vehicles had been carried unchanged through four announcements. Checking it properly yesterday, the count is at least six, spanning May 2022 to December 2025, two changes of government and three Prime Ministers. By June last year it was no longer a supporting fact in the body of a release. It was the headline.

That is a correction in our favour, which is the kind we are most likely to get wrong in the other direction, so it is stated here rather than buried.

Two other things came out of that check and both are in today's edition.

The number does not mean what its repetition implies. The command paper says thirty-eight thousand new jobs in the sector: engineers, technicians, insurers, certifiers. It counts an industry being built. It does not count drivers.

And the only published figure for what the sector has actually delivered, around fifteen hundred jobs between 2018 and 2022, has never once been printed next to it.

A note on that fifteen hundred. It reaches us through two independent carriers attributing it to government material, and a departmental source gives a more precise figure very close to it that we have not yet read at source. We have used the rounded number and said why. When we have opened the document ourselves, we will say so.

We have also not read a footnote. In the original command paper the thirty-eight thousand is footnoted, and as far as we can establish nobody quoting the figure in four years has turned that page, including us. We are going to.

Our letters to Uber, to Wayve, to Transport for London and to the GMB remain outstanding. The union asked, in June, for legislation to protect three hundred thousand drivers. We have asked it for the working behind that number on exactly the same terms we have asked the government for the working behind thirty-eight thousand, and we will print both answers, or the absence of both, in full.

— 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.