The cars are licensed. The guidance is not written.
London's robotaxi launch is unlikely to happen this year. Uber and Wayve were granted the capital's first private hire licences for autonomous vehicles a few weeks ago and said trips would begin later in the summer. More than a hundred thousand Londoners have joined the waiting list. The government had already brought commercial trials forward by a year, to spring 2026.
What has not arrived is a document. Transport for London has yet to publish the guidance that a company must follow in order to win approval, and its director of strategy told the London Assembly's transport committee last month that the authority would not be in a position to accept applications for some time — adding that there was no rush, and a great deal of work going on behind the scenes.
The vehicles are inspected and licensed. The technology is on the road, supervised. The demand has signed up in numbers most services never see. The constraint is the permission layer above all of it, and that moves at nobody's roadmap.
It is worth noticing how ordinary that is. Taxi and private hire work has always been governed by who is allowed to carry whom, where, on whose authority. Autonomy does not remove that question. It adds another party to it — and in London it has added three, with Waymo and Baidu's Apollo Go waiting on the same missing guidance.
Where we sit
Every account of autonomous transport treats the vehicle as the hard part. In Britain it increasingly isn't. The hard part is that permission is fragmented, conditional, and held by different bodies in different places — and it will stay that way whether the car has a driver in it or not.
Omnia is built for a world where who may do what, for whom, is configured rather than assumed. Work moves between two parties only when both have agreed to it, on rules each sets for itself.