Robotaxis reach Manchester's streets. London's Assembly isn't sold.

A week of more robotaxi cars and no more robotaxi permits. Google missed a date by its own account, Starship picked up a supermarket, and we’ve added a pair of glasses that promises UK shipping this autumn but won’t yet tell you the price in pounds.

The lead: Manchester gets robotaxis to map it, London’s politicians get cold feet

Six days after saying they would start testing in London “in the coming weeks”, Uber and Pony.ai turned up in Manchester. With Verne, a Croatian robotaxi company, they have started mapping Manchester’s streets with safety drivers at the wheel. 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. Pony.ai calls it testing and says Manchester is its second British city.

In London, the mood at City Hall is cooler. On 9 October the London Assembly Transport Committee published a report whose chair, Caroline Russell, said the committee “is not convinced that London should welcome autonomous passenger services”. It wants the government to give TfL the power to issue and withdraw permits when the full Automated Vehicles Act rules arrive in 2027, and to cap how many robotaxis an operator can run. It also wants operators to hand over crash and near-miss data within 24 hours. The recommendations aren’t binding, but TfL’s consent is already required for any London taxi-like pilot.

None of this changes the main fact on our driverless pilots entry: five months after applications opened, no permit for a passenger service with nobody at the wheel has been reported. The government’s promise is still “later this year”, which now leaves ten weeks.

What it means for you: if you’re in Manchester and see a Pony.ai car, there’s a person driving it and it can’t take you anywhere yet. In London, Wayve’s supervised Uber rides are still the only robotaxi you can book. Anyone planning around driverless transport outside London should think 2027 at the earliest.

Shipped

• Starship adds a supermarket. On 6 October Just Eat and Morrisons started robot grocery delivery from Cambourne in Cambridgeshire, reaching over 12,000 residents. It’s the fourth Morrisons store on robots, after three Morrisons Daily shops in Sunderland and Milton Keynes. We missed it last week; it’s on the board now.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Business: read the small print. The £13.80 promotional price, down from £16.10 per user per month ex VAT, needs an annual commitment, and Microsoft’s pricing page says it “applies to the first year only”. Budget year two at the full price.
• Still landed, still hard to buy: the Roborock Saros Z70 remains £1,599 and out of stock on Roborock’s UK store. Unitree’s G1 humanoid is still £20,999.99 at Scan, now marked “low stock”.

Due in

• Deliveroo robots: Canary Wharf was promised for “this October”. By Sunday we had found no report of a completed delivery. Eleven days left.
• New on the board: Snap Specs. Snap’s standalone AR glasses are $2,195, and Snap says they are “expected to ship this fall in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France”. UK buyers can put down a $200 refundable deposit at specs.com, which the site says “is not an order confirmation”. There’s no sterling price and no exact date. The autumn promise goes into the Slip Index with a deadline of 30 November.
• Android XR glasses: Samsung and Google still haven’t announced a date, a price or a country list. November remains a report from an unnamed Samsung official, not a promise.

Delayed

• Gemini in Google Workspace. On 30 September Google said “skills”, its replacement for Gems, would finish rolling out to Rapid Release Workspace customers by 12 October. On 13 October it said the Workspace rollout was “delayed until further notice”. Skills in the Gemini app itself started on 13 October, due to finish by mid-November. Business users can keep their Gems until no sooner than 1 March 2027, so nothing you rely on stops working. It’s a small slip, but it’s in the Slip Index all the same: we record the companies we like as carefully as the ones we don’t.
• Waymo London: no London news. Waymo’s October posts were about financing, US cities and Toronto. The board still says “by the end of 2026”.
• Vertical’s Valo: on 16 October Vertical signed suppliers for the seats and the inertial reference system. The certification target is still 2029, and the release doesn’t repeat it.

Not orderable, still

• Tesla FSD: Slovakia became what’s reported as the ninth EU country to recognise the Dutch approval, and Tesla now calls the system “Assisted Driving” on most European sites. The EU-wide vote is still expected in December. None of this applies to the UK.
• Tesla Optimus: Tesla reports results on Wednesday, the day after this issue. If there’s a reveal date or a price, it’ll be in next week’s issue.
• 1X NEO, Figure 03, Neuralink: nothing new, and no UK plans. We checked.

That’s the board for this week. If you know someone in Manchester who drives for a living, forward this to them. See you next Tuesday at 7am.