Notes on autonomy, dispatch and the economics of keeping vehicles busy.
Omnia Platforms is building a neutral dispatch layer for ground mobility. A party with work connects once and reaches any fleet it has agreed terms with; a fleet connects once and is reachable by any source of work it has agreed to accept. What we are building →
Uber has told the FT that part of its reason for backing several driverless companies at once is to “fragment the market” — so no single one grows big enough to sell rides without Uber's app in the middle. It is also lobbying alongside drivers' unions to slow robotaxi rollouts. Both moves protect the same thing. A market deliberately split into pieces still needs something to join it back up.
Waymo has asked San Francisco for formal kerb space to park between rides, and its own policy manager cites the reason: roughly 40 per cent of ride-hail and AV miles run empty. The rebuttal disputes who pays for the kerb. Neither side asks why the vehicle is waiting.
Uber and Wayve hold London's first private hire licences for autonomous vehicles, more than a hundred thousand people are on the waiting list, and the launch has slipped anyway. What has not arrived is the guidance a company must follow to apply — and TfL's director of strategy told the London Assembly there is no rush to publish it.
Uber has sold its entire stake in Serve Robotics, and Serve has told investors it does not expect to renew the delivery partnership when it expires in early 2027. The detail worth sitting with is what the two companies actually disagreed about — not the fee, but the operating m…
Transport for London has licensed Wayve's autonomous Mustang Mach-Es as private hire vehicles, and early-access rides are now underway. The autonomy is Wayve's. The passengers are Uber's — more than a hun…
Gett is adding a private hire option to its app, fulfilled by drivers on FreeNow's platform rather than its own. The reason it gave its drivers is the interesting part: corporate customers a…
Transport for London has granted private hire vehicle licences to Wayve's autonomous Ford Mustang Mach-Es, and was explicit that they were licensed as PHVs rather than as automated vehicles.…
A good piece on whether London's black cabs could do without third-party apps argues that those apps function as additional digital ranks: switching them off does not restore independence, i…
The DfT has consulted on cutting taxi and private hire licensing from 263 authorities to around 70, transferring the function to local transport authorities. The stated aim is to curb out-of…
At an LSE Cities panel — Beyond the Car Divide: fair transport policy for an autonomous mobility future, 24 February 2026 — Professor Glenn Lyons of UWE Bristol described how it happens: “We…
TfL granted 701 new private hire driver licences in a single week, taking London past 111,000 drivers across 1,862 operators. The trade press draws the obvious conclusion: more drivers chasi…
FreeNow by Lyft has begun testing Baidu's Apollo Go vehicles in London, and says they will run alongside its existing taxi and private hire supply rather than replace it. That makes three Lo…
Uber is lobbying for rules — including a proposed 85% human-driver floor in New Jersey's robotaxi pilot — that would require driverless services to run human and autonomous supply side by si…
TfL's own commissioner notes that no driverless vehicle would meet current private-hire rules as they stand. It's a useful corrective to the hype: the shift to autonomous supply will be slow…
London is arguing about who should license driverless taxis — the Department for Transport or TfL. Worth noting what that argument does not cover: TfL has acknowledged that operators can see…
Waymo is reported to be exploring an exit from its Uber partnership, having already ended the Phoenix pilot in June. The friction is instructive: terms one side found unsustainable, disputes…
Pony.ai reported break-even unit economics in Guangzhou and Shenzhen within four months of launching its latest vehicle, at around 25 orders per vehicle per day. It is the first robotaxi pro…
Deadheading has always been a cost operators absorbed quietly. Proposals to tax vehicles by the mile change that, and make the value of a fuller order book something you can calculate rather…
Three operators trialling driverless vehicles in London, each with its own booking route in, and no way for work to cross between them. A reasonable position for anyone who already has custo…
Stellantis will license Wayve's driving software into its vehicles from 2028. If autonomy arrives as a feature of ordinary vehicles rather than the property of a few robotaxi firms, the part…
Infrastructure funds are treating robotaxi depots as a new asset class. Every pound of that is a fixed cost recovered only through vehicles being used — which makes utilisation the number th…