With Waymo confirming plans to begin self-driving services in London in 2026, the spotlight is now on the UK’s readiness for commercial automated mobility. As we have long advocated, successful adoption isn’t just about the technology, but also public trust, understanding behaviour and how well we design the service for cities and people.
For almost a decade, DG Cities has been deeply engaged in research, trials and supporting policy across the UK’s automated mobility ecosystem. Our work through DeepSafe, DRisk and the Smart Mobility Living Lab (SMLL) has shown us where public sentiment is, where it must shift and how operators and policymakers can align. With Project Endeavour (and its earlier iterations on the Greenwich Peninsula) we were part of the first public trials of self-driving services on UK roads. We became established as a leading authority on public attitudes to autonomous transport and in 2023, Ed Houghton gave evidence to the UK Government’s Transport Select Committee on findings from DG Cities’ research.
DeepSafe: bridging the perception gap through behavioural insight
Our most recent completed project, DeepSafe was a research group set up by Innovate UK to accelerate commercial deployment of self-driving vehicles by combining “sensor-real” edge-case data with public engagement and behavioural research. DG Cities led work into how self-driving services are marketed, how people interpret them and how messaging influences acceptance. Our research produced some interesting insights:
The public systematically overestimates how safe UK roads are. In a December 2024 survey, 92% of respondents guessed the number of people killed or seriously injured (KSIs) was less than the true figure, with the average guess ~11,400 vs the official ~29,700.
When asked to prioritise the UK government’s transport system goals, only 37% of respondents picked “road safety” (vs 53% for affordability, 46% for equality).
Expectations for AV safety are nonlinear. If an AV is portrayed as “slightly less safe than a competent human driver,” only ~3.7% would try it; when it matches, ~36.8% would; when it is marginally safer, ~56.5%; and at high safety margins, about 3 in 4 express willingness to adopt.
Even modest safety gains can materially shift public acceptance. Messaging that highlights the potential of AVs to reduce KSIs by 10% yields a doubling of support when compared to AVs that do not have an effect on KSIs.
These results suggest a ‘staircase model’ of acceptance: safety needs to be clear, credible and aspirational. Not just “as good as human,” but meaningfully better. Public support can stall if the messaging fails to bridge this perceptual gap.
““It presents a crucial opportunity for public education and awareness campaigns that address misconceptions regarding the current state of road safety in the UK and contextualise it with regard to the true potential of AVs to make our roads safer.” ”
The DeepSafe consortium built on an earlier successful team, DRISK which looked at ‘edge case’ scenarios. The project’s aim was to create the world’s largest library of driving situations that are unusual or unexpected, the rare events it’s hard to train a vehicle to navigate, but could be dangerous. The study also gave us a further opportunity to gauge public attitudes to the tech - we took our questions and public information stand on the road to Leeds, Wrexham, Portsmouth and more, as our film explains.
From trial to rollout: Project Endeavour
We know that technology trials alone won’t win public support. Project Endeavour was a consortium of DG Cities, Oxbotica, TRL, Immense and others. Here, DG Cities led on service design and understanding the public’s perceptions of the technology. Our role was to bring the human experience to every technical decision.
We used several engagement methods to explore public perceptions of autonomous vehicles. These included national surveys to assess awareness and attitudes, live public trials in Oxford, Birmingham and Greenwich where participants experienced AV rides, virtual-reality experiences to engage people remotely during COVID-19 (with VR headsets also provided for schools) and workshops with local authorities and stakeholders. Together, these activities measured changes in trust, safety perceptions and readiness for AV adoption.
Part of this meant looking to the future and anticipating how self-driving services will interact with wider systems. To support this, we developed the Mobility Assessment Framework to benchmark autonomous vehicles against other mobility modes using social, economic and environmental metrics.
An early baseline survey in 2019 captured public attitudes ahead of pilots. Looking back now, this was a rare ‘before’ snapshot against which to measure change and current attitudes to Waymo’s move. Our insights from Endeavour emphasise that rollouts must treat the public not as passive observers but as co-designers: behaviour, trust, usage incentives must be integral to service design, not an add-on.
SMLL: building a global centre for the future of connected and autonomous mobility in Woolwich
How do you deploy a live testbed for mobility innovation in a living, complex city? The Smart Mobility Living Lab (SMLL) is an innovative answer to that question. It’s Europe’s most advanced connected and autonomous mobility urban testbed, offering testing and development of future mobility solutions. SMLL provides a real-world environment where vehicles operating under current legislative controls and strict safety requirements on the existing road network can be subject to monitoring and data gathering.
Our contribution to its inception spanned infrastructure, connectivity (this aspect was a precursor to our sister company, Digital Greenwich Connect), governance and trial orchestration. We led the ‘connectivity backbone’ for the testbed and understood its trade-offs, building constraints and deployment challenges. We helped find a site in London that combined operational needs with accessibility via existing public transport and future infrastructure. Because London is arguably one of the most challenging environments to make AVs work, SMLL sets a high bar: if you can operate here, you can make it work elsewhere.
““The public demands transparency from operators, particularly around safety, and when things go wrong, reporting is important. This is a general requirement for AI that is a black box.” ”
What Waymo (and others) must get right in 2026
As Waymo gets ready to take to London’s roads, there are many lessons from our work.
Don’t treat safety as a checkbox. Messaging must transparently communicate how self-driving services address and reduce risks, not just match human baseline.
The safety case alone isn’t enough - our work shows affordability is a priority, so if access isn’t open to wider groups it won’t be seen as a viable solution by the public.
Design around citizens, not cars. Use participatory engagement, trial pilots, feedback loops and co-design. People must feel ownership of the service for it to succeed.
Bridge the perception gap via education and narrative. Use storytelling, real edge-case simulations and comparative framing (what human error can do) to shift mental models.
Put connectivity and infrastructure ahead of fleet size. The vehicle is only one piece of the service. Reliable, low-latency networks, redundancy and city integration matter.
Measure beyond rides: use multi-metric evaluation. Use frameworks to judge AV services not just on trips, but on equity, emissions, congestion and citizen benefit.
The UK is at an inflection point for self-driving services. Waymo’s arrival would be a landmark moment, but success hinges as much on public acceptance as its technology and ability to integrate with the tangle of London’s streets and other travel priorities.
MERGE Greenwich was a part-Innovate UK funded research project looking into the feasibility of autonomous ride-sharing services in Greenwich.
DG Cities’ decade of on-the-ground trials, behavioural research and testbed building serve as a proving ground and guide. If you are in government, media, mobility, regulation or civic leadership and want smarter commentary, deeper insight, or a partner for London’s AV future, get in touch.
We’re interested to see what 2026 brings.