Order of Play September 3rd
etn Newsletter | September 03, 2026
Welcome back. The main thing happening today is London getting its first self-driving taxis. Live from 12–3 BST. Here's your Order of Play.
WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY
For the first time, Londoners can hail a self-driving taxi.
From today, anyone requesting an UberX, Electric or Comfort ride in London can be matched with an autonomous car from British startup Wayve, at no extra cost. The app shows the fare upfront and lets you switch to a human driver before the car arrives. Still, getting one won’t be easy. There are only 15 cars on London’s roads, compared with more than 100,000 private-hire vehicles, and more than 140,000 Londoners have already opted in.
Most rivals, Waymo included, rely on detailed maps of every road. Wayve takes a different approach, using its “AI Driver” to learn from experience much like a human driver. It reads data from the car’s sensors in real time and makes decisions on the fly, rather than following a fixed route. Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall calls the approach “AV2.0”. He says it is what allows the technology to scale to somewhere as complex as London without hand-coding rules for every junction.
London is arguably the toughest city in which to prove the technology works. Its medieval layout is a maze of roundabouts, bus lanes that appear out of nowhere, and pedestrians who, as anyone who’s walked around London knows, tend to cross wherever they fancy. There’s a real concern about how large-scale automation will affect taxi drivers, the kind of backlash that has already slowed robotaxis in New York.
Still, it’s a landmark moment and a win for British tech. Founded in Cambridge in 2017, Wayve is backed by Nvidia and Microsoft. It has beaten Waymo and Baidu to a paying London service, in what co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall calls “the space race for our generation.” Next comes a move to purpose-built Nissan Leaf robotaxis. Eventually, Wayve wants to remove the safety driver altogether. “I don’t want to put a timeline on it,” Kendall said. “But we’re pushing as fast as we can.”
We're getting into all of it on today's show at 12 BST.
YESTERDAY’S MOMENT
Balderton Capital partner Rob Moffat came into the studio to talk through everything from Europe’s edge in vertical AI and the future of gaming to whether VC is getting carried away.
He joined Balderton in late 2009, when Europe’s venture scene was still in its early days. "The good news was that we only had two competitors. It was Index and Accel and Balderton… The bad news was that there was not that many great companies." A lot of the meetings, he admitted, were dead on arrival: "It was pretty clear about five minutes in this is not going to work. The ambition wasn't there. The best people weren't doing it."
Watch the full interview below.
YESTERDAY’S BANGER OF THE DAY
VIEWER TAKES
Join us live,
Luke & Ronan
etn is made possible by Airwallex, Eleven Labs, Polymarket, Framer, Base, Metaview, Hex, BVNK and Valarian