Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, which operates in San Francisco, has already started testing autonomous taxis in London.
Saber Fallah, a professor of safe AI and autonomy at the University of Surrey, told Metro that the new taxis are likely to be required to have a safety driver inside because of London’s complex road layout, making them autonomous vehicles but not fully driverless.
‘I’m pretty sure they are not going to be fully driverless. The recommendation is going to include a safety driver in the car, so it is not fully driverless,’ he said, adding that the goal of self-driving taxis is to ‘make more profit for the company by not paying drivers and not having to share their profits with the drivers.’