I quoted a man about sitting in a car that drives itself. He was describing test work, months before the cars were licensed to carry passengers

On 7 September I wrote about Vitor Velosa, a vehicle safety operator at Wayve, who had told a reporter in February that he spends more time not driving than driving. I called it a man doing the work saying what it has become.

I noted at the time that he was describing testing, not the passenger service that had started a few days earlier. Then I wrote the rest of the column as if the difference did not matter.

It matters. Wayve has since told this paper that the people in the seats of the passenger service are trained private hire drivers, and that a car rental company called Otto Car oversees them, not Wayve. So the man I quoted and the people carrying Uber passengers are, on Wayve's account, overseen by different companies.

I do not know whether any of those drivers has ever sat in a Wayve test car. Nobody has said.

Wayve describes the people in the passenger cars as skilled and experienced drivers, trained to support its technology. That tells me they were chosen with care. It does not tell me who they answer to at the end of a shift, or who decides whether there is another shift next week.

What I did, looking back, was find the nearest human voice and let it stand for the whole of something. It is an easy mistake and a common one, and I made it in a column about paying attention.

Some of what I wrote probably holds in both seats. Watching a road you are not steering on is the same task whoever pays you to do it. The attention it asks for is the same, and so is the strangeness of being needed least when the system works best.

The rest of a working life is not the same. Whether there is a salary, or a rate per trip, or something else. Whether there is paid holiday. Whether, when the seat is no longer required, anybody owes you anything. Those questions do not depend on what your eyes are doing for eight hours. They depend on who you work for, and that is the part nobody has told us.

A column like this one is supposed to be about the hours that belong to the person. I cannot write about those hours with any accuracy until I know whose they are.

So this is a correction, and it leaves a gap open. There are people in London right now spending their shifts in the driver's seat of a car that is driving itself, with a stranger in the back. I found one voice and it was the wrong one to speak for them. We have not heard from them yet.