Driverless Taxis and Buses Can Now Operate on UK Roads With No Driver

Driverless taxis and buses can now legally carry paying passengers on UK roads, under permit rules that came into force on 15 May 2026.

A permit lasts up to five years, but the Secretary of State can suspend or withdraw one over a single serious safety incident or traffic offence.

Pilots without a safety driver are set to begin in England from this year, with Wayve, Uber and Waymo among the operators named as ready to run them.

Every Road User Now Shares the Road With a New Kind of Vehicle

The Automated Vehicles (Permits for Automated Passenger Services) Regulations 2026 were made on 20 April 2026, laid before Parliament on 23 April, and came into force on 15 May 2026. They set out the legal machinery for a permit scheme created under Part 5 of the Automated Vehicles Act 2024, and that scheme is what actually allows a company to run a paid passenger service using a vehicle with nobody controlling it, on ordinary public roads.

The permit covers two kinds of service: taxi- and private hire-style trips in England, and bus-style routes in England, Wales and Scotland. A vehicle running under one of these permits is legally allowed to carry fare-paying passengers even where no person is required to be in the driving seat, so long as the operator holds a valid permit from the Department for Transport.

The government has said it wants small pilots of these taxi- and bus-like services running on English roads without a safety driver from as early as this year, ahead of a fuller rollout planned for 2027. Wayve, Uber and Waymo have all said publicly they intend to take part, and London has been named as one of the first cities likely to see a passenger-carrying trial.

What a permit actually allows, and what can take it away

A permit can run for up to five years before it needs renewing. The bigger point for anyone sharing the road with one of these vehicles is how easily that permit can be pulled. The regulations give the Secretary of State the power to vary, suspend or withdraw a permit without the operator’s consent if a single vehicle commits what the rules call a serious traffic infraction, if several vehicles under the same permit commit similar infractions, or if there are serious safety concerns about a vehicle. An operator can also lose a permit for failing to meet an undertaking it gave when applying, or if a vehicle turns out to be unroadworthy under the same legal definition that applies to any car on a British road.

In practice, that means a driverless taxi or bus operating under one of these permits is held to a standard that can be enforced faster than the courts: the regulator does not need a criminal conviction to suspend a permit, only a reasonable safety concern or a pattern of rule-breaking. Where DVSA has to build a court case against a rogue garage or driver, the Department for Transport can suspend an automated operator’s right to carry passengers directly, sometimes before the operator even has a chance to respond if the department judges the situation urgent enough.

How complaints and incidents get handled

The regulations also set out what happens to information generated by these vehicles. Operators can be required to share safety-related incident data with the Secretary of State, who can then disclose factual information about an incident to the public where it is judged to be in the public interest. Accident information can be passed to the police in the same way a human driver’s accident report would be. Live and historical data on routes, timetables, fares and vehicle locations can also be shared for other purposes, which is the mechanism that would let a council or transport body see how an automated service is actually running in its area.

For a passenger or another road user with a complaint, the regulations allow a complaints-handling organisation to pass details of a complaint back to the person who made it, and give both applicants and permit holders a formal right to an internal review of a Department for Transport decision within 28 days.

Why this counts as a genuine change, not a trial in name only

Self-driving trials with a human safety driver behind the wheel, ready to take over, have run on UK roads for several years. What changed in May is narrower and more concrete: a legal route now exists for a company to carry paying members of the public with nobody able to take back manual control at all. The vehicle itself has to meet a safety standard the government has described as at least as high as a careful and competent human driver, assessed under a new performance standard DVSA helped develop over the past year, before any permit is granted.

That is a different proposition to a research trial. A permit holder is running a live commercial service, and the rules that govern it are built to be pulled quickly, not just punished after the fact. For a driver who has never booked one of these services and has no plans to, the practical change is what is now legally allowed to be on the same stretch of road: a vehicle with a paying passenger inside and no one at the wheel, operating under a permit that can be suspended within days if it causes serious disruption, a safety scare, or a repeated traffic offence.

What to expect over the next year

Full implementation of the wider automated vehicles framework is still scheduled for 2027. Between now and then, the pilots that begin under this permit scheme will be small and geographically limited, most likely starting in London, and each one requires local consent from the relevant licensing authority before it can run taxi- or private hire-style trips in that area. Anyone wanting to check whether a specific operator holds a current permit, or to raise a concern about a specific vehicle or incident, can do so through the Department for Transport rather than the operator itself. It is the department that grants, reviews and can withdraw every permit under this scheme.

Who is actually liable if something goes wrong

One question the regulations do not answer directly is who pays when a driverless taxi or bus is involved in a collision. That is dealt with elsewhere in the Automated Vehicles Act 2024, which places legal responsibility on the operator and its insurer rather than any individual passenger, on the basis that nobody in the vehicle has control over how it drives. For another road user involved in a crash with a permitted automated vehicle, the practical route to a claim runs through the operator’s insurance in broadly the same way it would with any other vehicle, though the incident-reporting duties built into this permit scheme mean the operator is also required to pass details of the crash to the police and, where the Secretary of State judges it serious enough, to the department itself.

That dual reporting line is one of the clearer differences between an automated passenger service and an ordinary minicab or bus. A human driver involved in a crash has a duty to stop and report it under existing road traffic law. An automated vehicle’s operator has that same duty, plus a direct data pipeline to the regulator that can trigger a permit review without the driver, in this case the vehicle itself, ever being interviewed.

Sources

The Automated Vehicles (Permits for Automated Passenger Services) Regulations 2026, legislation.gov.uk.

Department for Transport, Automated passenger services permitting scheme: government response.

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