TL;DR
Uber and the Chinese autonomous-driving company Pony AI have started mapping Manchester’s streets with safety drivers at the wheel, the first UK city outside London named for a planned robotaxi service. No passengers are being carried, no launch date has been set, and Transport for Greater Manchester says it has received no application to run driverless taxis. The move comes a week after Pony AI said its seventh-generation cars would reach London on Uber’s platform, and a month after Uber’s supervised passenger rides with Wayve began in the capital.
Zag Daily reported the Manchester programme on 14 October. The third partner is Verne, a Croatian autonomous-mobility company that already runs paid autonomous rides with Uber in Zagreb and supplies the operational framework; Pony AI provides the driving technology and Uber the passengers. None of the three has said how many cars are involved.
What is and is not happening
The vehicles are preparing for Manchester’s roads rather than serving anyone. Pony AI’s online announcement pointed to the roughly six million daily journeys made across Greater Manchester and the region’s ambition for “more connected, accessible mobility” as the reason to expand there.
The regulatory path exists but has not been used. In May the government began taking applications for a pilot under which taxi and bus operators could run self-driving services with no safety driver. Uber and Pony AI have not said their Manchester work will carry passengers under that scheme, and TfGM has confirmed nothing has been lodged with it.
Self-driving passenger services already run elsewhere in the UK in a more limited form, including the Cambridge Connector shuttle, whose passengers ride on public roads with a safety driver present.
The London backdrop
Manchester follows a crowded London picture. We reported Uber’s launch of supervised autonomous rides with Wayve in September, after an earlier delay to the rollout, and Zag Daily notes that Alphabet’s Waymo and China’s Baidu are running their own London testing programmes. Pony AI’s London plan through Uber was announced the week before Manchester.
Looking forward
Mapping is the cheap, visible first step, and in our view the Manchester announcement is as much about Uber signalling a UK network beyond London as about imminent service. Two things would change that: an application to TfGM, and a decision to use the May pilot scheme to remove the safety driver. Until either happens, the useful reading for Greater Manchester is that the region has become a test bed for a Chinese driving stack operating under a Croatian service model, and the questions about data, liability and local consent that follow from that have not yet been put to anyone.