Wayve built the driver. Uber brought the passengers.
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 hundred thousand Londoners joined the interest list in eight weeks. And the trips run under Uber's operator licence, because London's triple-lock requires the operator, the driver and the vehicle to be licensed by the same authority. Wayve could not carry a passenger here without somebody else's paperwork.
Uber says it has more than thirty autonomous partners. So the scarce thing in this arrangement is not the driver. It is the queue of people waiting for one — and the licence that lets you carry them. The next buyers of this technology will be the companies that own the vehicles: fleet operators, leasing arms, councils. They will hold the asset, the depot and the finance agreement. What they will not hold is an app with millions of people in it.
Where we sit
Whoever owns the fleet owns the empty miles. The company that licensed the software carries none of that, and the company with the app is under no obligation to share it.
Omnia is built for the party holding the vehicles. Connect once, and be reachable by any source of work you have agreed to accept — several of them, on your terms, without a single app deciding how busy your day is.