London RoboTaxi rollout is running behind the ambitious schedule set out by the government, with the three main operators now unlikely to launch a fully driverless commercial service this year, according to FT

• Alphabet's (GOOG) Waymo, Uber (UBER)-backed Wayve, and Baidu (9888 HK) are still facing regulatory or technical barriers.

Timelines for fully driverless commercial services have repeatedly slipped in past rollouts, with the binding constraint usually the regulator rather than the technology: operators can demonstrate capability long before authorities certify it, and governments that set ambitious schedules have tended to concede later that the framework, liability rules and permitting were not ready. The actors here split into distinct exposures: Waymo as a direct operator, Uber exposed through its stake in Wayve, and Baidu, which has prior form running driverless services at home and is therefore further along the learning curve even if it faces the same UK gatekeeping. The pattern from comparable markets is a sequence of pilot permits, supervised operation with safety drivers, and only then fully unmanned service, meaning a missed launch date is usually a re-timing of revenue rather than a lost market. The immediate follow-ons are any revised regulatory timetable from UK authorities, whether operators respond with scaled-back supervised launches, and whether other cities move ahead faster and become the template. For the named equities the historical read is that autonomous news flow moves the purer plays and mobility names at the margin, but a regulatory slip of this kind rarely re-rates diversified parents.