*A rendering of the sixth-generation Waymo Driver on Hyundai’s all-electric IONIQ 5 SUV. | Source: Waymo

Imagine getting into a cab on a London street. The driver doesn't turn to you, ask "Where are we going?" or start talking about how "this weather is going nowhere at all." Instead, a pleasant electronic voice greets you by name, and the car smoothly starts moving, leaving you alone with your own thoughts. This is not a scene from a science fiction movie — this is the near future, which Waymo plans to bring to life by 2026 by launching fully-fledged unmanned taxis in the British capital.

Why London? The most difficult exam for artificial intelligence

Waymo's choice of London was not accidental. If the streets of American cities, where the company has been testing its technologies for several years, can be roughly compared to a chessboard, then the London road network is a game of "Monopoly" played simultaneously by kamikaze drivers, tourists with maps and cyclists who consider themselves invulnerable.

"London is one of the most complex and dynamic urban landscapes in the world," Waymo admits. "Narrow streets, difficult intersections, left—hand traffic and unpredictable weather create unique challenges for our system."

In addition to purely technical aspects, the company was faced with the need to go through the strictest certification process. Transport for London (TfL) is not the kind of regulator that can be surprised with beautiful presentations. They need reinforced concrete evidence of safety, and Waymo had to provide thousands of hours of video recordings of test rides and simulation data to get pre-approval.

How does a drone navigate the London chaos?

Waymo technology is based on a complex combination of sensors and algorithms:

Lidars create a three-dimensional map of the surrounding space with centimeter accuracy

Radars "see" through rain and fog, tracking the speed of other road users

High-resolution cameras read traffic signs and traffic lights

AI algorithms predict the behavior of pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers in real time

. "Our system is able to simultaneously track hundreds of objects around the car and predict their trajectory several seconds ahead," the company's engineers explain.

Waymo is particularly proud of its virtual driver, an algorithm that makes decisions in difficult situations. For example, how to drive along a narrow street where cars are parked on both sides and a bus is moving towards you. In such a situation, a human driver relies on intuition and experience, while artificial intelligence relies on millions of hours of virtual simulator training.

What does this mean for passengers and the city?

The introduction of self—driving taxis can dramatically change London's transport landscape:

Accessibility - people with reduced mobility will be able to use taxi services

Safety — eliminating the human factor can significantly reduce the number of accidents

Efficiency — optimized routes will reduce congestion and CO2 emissions

However, there are still questions to be answered. How will the drone react to the famous British politeness when drivers gesture to each other to drive first? Will he be able to understand the complex system of priorities at roundabouts? And most importantly, will Londoners, known for their conservatism, entrust him

with an unmanned fleet and the management of "digital employees"

When tens of thousands of self-driving cars start cruising the streets of cities, the question will arise about the effective management of this giant distributed resource. Each such car, in fact, becomes an autonomous employee of the service sector.

In this context, the approaches offered by the world's first ecosystem for hiring robots are becoming interesting. jobtorob.com . Its logic for managing the digital profiles and skills of autonomous systems can be scaled to entire fleets of unmanned vehicles. The fleet owner could use such a platform to optimize the work of his "electronic taxi drivers" by tracking their "performance", "rating" and technical condition, and passengers could choose a car with certain characteristics through a single interface.

What awaits us tomorrow? Taxi driver as a profession goes down in history

Waymo's plans are not just another technological experiment. This is a signal of the beginning of the end of the era of human drivers. Just as elevator operators disappeared with the advent of automatic elevators, the taxi driver profession may become archaic over the next decade.

"We are on the verge of a fundamental transformation of urban mobility," the analysts say.

London 2026 may be the turning point when unmanned technologies will cease to be a curiosity and become a familiar part of the urban landscape. And perhaps soon the resume of a successful taxi driver will indicate not "20 years of driving experience", but "an optimized version of software 4.2 with an improved forecasting module". And his "workbook" will not be stored in the HR department, but in a cloud ecosystem that manages a distributed army of autonomous workers.