London will wage international robotaxi warfare

Hyundai Motor Co

Yesterday 12:05

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist.  The opinions expressed are her own.
By Katrina Hamlin

    HONG KONG, June 25 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The biggest battle in the fast-developing robotaxi wars is about to kick off in London. Until now, the skirmishes have been largely domestic affairs. The UK capital, though, will be the first to host autonomous-driving combatants from China, the UK and the United States.
There's plenty to fight for: the city is home to more than 100,000 taxis and private-hire vehicles making nearly 150 million trips each year. It warren-like roads are packed with cars, its famous doubledecker buses, emergency vehicles and cyclists, driven and ridden by people whose gestures and signalling will be tough for software to parse, let alone emulate. Successfully navigating these streets wou give their futuristic tech credibility around the globe.
Three companies aim to welcome paying passengers this year after UK regulators opened applications last month. Each has something to prove. Alphabet's GOOGL.O Waymo, valued at $126 billion after its most recent funding round in February, logs more than 500,000 rides a week, the company says, while $38 billion Chinese tech behemoth Baidu's Apollo Go clocks around 250,000, per HSBC. They have not had a chance to face off before, since China-U.S. tensions complicate efforts to enter one another's home turf, which remain their main markets. London-based Wayve, a nine-year-old startup led by co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall, will be offering commercial services for the first time.
At stake is the opportunity to be a victor in the robotaxi services market whose global revenue could rev up from less than $1 billion this year to over $168 billion in 2035, researchers at Counterpoint forecast. That's less than the frothy $5 trillion value that General Motors GM.N dreamed up at the start of the decade.
But the principle attractions of autonomous vehicles remain effectively summed up by the triple-zero slogan the Detroit carmaker adopted at the time: zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion. The idea is that fleets of tech-driven electric vehicles - most if not all robotaxis are battery powered - which never tire or drink alcohol are smart enough to avoid causing or falling victim to accidents and traffic jams.
They would also turn a tidy profit for their operators by removing the most expensive part of the ride: the taxi driver. In London, that contributes to fares being the fifth-highest in the world, per Deutsche Bank.
The Big Smoke is going test the battle-readiness of all these assumptions. Start with pricing. In U.S. markets, operators have tended to price autonomous rides in line with legacy cabs. London will probably start out similarly as companies chase profitability, but that may not last.
European consumers could eventually pay less than $1 per kilometre for robotaxi rides, the Boston Consulting Group calculated in January, once a fleet reaches "full scale". That's more than trillionaire Elon Musk suggested multiple times in the past, claiming operating costs for Tesla TSLA.O cabs would be around 20 cents a mile. But it's still less than an average of $2.90 to $4.50 per kilometre for conventional cabs and might even lure passengers away from public transport: a fifth of respondents surveyed by BMG Research last year thought that could happen in London.
Competition and the need to market novel tech may drive discounts. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Waymo charged just above incumbent ride-hailing services at nearly $6 per kilometre while newcomer Tesla's price was only $2, according to a study from price comparison app Obi, examining data from November 2025 to January 2026; another provider, Amazon.com’s AMZN.O Zoox, was offering limited services for free.
Cost will be a key front in the battle for passengers, but so will how to order one. Waymo is taking a calculated risk launching on a proprietary app that users will have to download. That could lend an early advantage to Baidu, whose cars will be on both Uber Technologies UBER.N and Lyft's LYFT.O platforms, and Wayve, which will work with Uber. But if Waymo's gamble pays off, it would dodge comissions - Uber takes a cut of as much as 50% of fares in some markets, according to a recent study from Columbia Business School academic Len Sherman.
On top of that, the trio will line up different driving system strategies against one another. Waymo and Baidu deploy cameras, lidar – using laser pulses to gather data – and radar alongside high-definition maps. These multiple options offer redundancy, so that if one falters, another can supply information instead. Wayve, on the other hand, can handle a variety of hardware stacks, including the vision-only option championed by Musk - who has long been disdainful of lidar - and camera plus radar. It does not require mapping, leaning more heavily on an AI model to assess surroundings and make rapid driving decisions. In theory, that should open up new neighbourhoods more quickly than peers that are “geo-fenced” in meticulously mapped areas.
These all come with wildly different outlays, which may well impact how much operators can charge. Analysts at Morningstar estimate Waymo’s retrofitted Jaguar i-Pace costs up to $125,000, while newer Zeekr and Hyundai Motor 005380.KS models are at least $45,000. In contrast, Wayve reckons it can work with a rig of sensors and chips that add just a few hundred dollars to the price of the Ford Mustang Mach-E that make up its test fleet. Baidu, like Waymo, shells out for a variety of sensors, but custom made-in-China designs bring costs down, clocking in at less than $30,000, excluding the battery. 
It's not just their own arsenals that will decide their fate, though. Spectators raise the stakes further. Potential passengers include not only locals but also London’s 20-million-plus annual tourists. The free-wheeling British media will have a field day when the young technology inevitably falters. Teething problems persist. In March, a system failure froze over 100 Baidu robotaxis in Wuhan. Three weeks later, a Waymo cab drove into a flooded area in San Antonio, prompting the company to recall 3,800 vehicles.
The city’s financiers will have a front row seat too. That matters, because none of the three has reported reaching profitability yet, leaving them dependent on raising fresh funds. Waymo drummed up $16 billion in February, most of which came from parent Alphabet, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the valuations of peers Pony AI PONY.Oand WeRide WRD.O are stalling. Their New York-listed shares have fallen 50% and 34% respectively this year as shareholders eye competition from carmakers like Tesla, Geely and Xpeng 9868.HK.
London is set for an epic three-way street fight as it hosts what is shaping up to be the most consequential robotaxi confrontation yet. It's time to buckle up.
Follow Katrina Hamlin on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

(Editing by Antony Currie; Production by Aditya Srivastav)
((For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on HAMLIN/katrina.hamlin@thomsonreuters.com; Reuters Messaging: katrina.hamlin.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net))