London Black Cabs Have Memorized 25,000 Streets Since 1865. Waymo Is Mapping Them Now.

The Knowledge, London's taxi licensing examination, has been running since 1865. Candidates must memorize 25,000 streets, thousands of landmarks and businesses, and the fastest legal route between any two points across a city built before the grid plan existed. The oral exam, called appearances, is conducted by Transport for London examiners who measure routes for efficiency and penalize deviations. Average preparation time runs to years. The failure rate at each session is high. 60 Minutes reports that Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company owned by Alphabet, is already mapping London streets ahead of a planned commercial launch, and that Wave, a British startup backed by Nvidia and Microsoft, is also targeting operations in the city. Neither has received regulatory approval to carry passengers yet. Both expect to begin later this year.

Waymo's safety record in the United States is the most complete data point available for evaluating the technology's readiness. The company now operates across 11 US cities with millions of rides per month and cites internal data showing a five-times safety improvement over human drivers. In the US, it has also generated incidents: a Waymo vehicle drove through an active police scene in Los Angeles, and there have been documented cases of robotaxis impeding emergency responders and illegally passing stopped school buses, leading to a software recall and a federal investigation. None of this has slowed Waymo's commercial expansion. London presents a materially different environment: the city has no grid, traffic concentrations are extreme in the central zones, and The Knowledge exists precisely because navigating London by GPS routing is considered inadequate for professional hire. Wave's approach attempts to sidestep pre-mapping entirely by training its AI on broad driving experience from around the world, using the same conceptual logic a new human driver would use when navigating an unfamiliar city. Whether that holds in Westminster or Soho will only be known when it is tested.

60 Minutes visited the Transport for London examination centre and observed candidates being tested. Aspiring driver Steven Fairbrass, who has been studying for eight years, failed his 20th attempt on camera, describing the route between two points in Soho almost correctly before losing confidence on a street name. Anu Morjani, who had been studying for five years, passed his 41st attempt and earned his license the same week Waymo began mapping the city. A University College London study found that the hippocampi of working black cab drivers, the brain region linked to spatial memory, physically enlarged over the course of their careers. Tom Skolian, a 34-year veteran driver quoted in the segment, compared GPS navigation to a hot dog vendor competing with a professional chef. The number of licensed black cab drivers in London has fallen from 25,000 to 16,000 over the past decade, a decline driven primarily by Uber and other ride-hailing services rather than autonomous vehicles.

Bottom line: The Knowledge is not just an exam. It is a 160-year-old institutional argument that human spatial intelligence is worth protecting in a profession where a stranger trusts you completely. Waymo and Wave entering London does not resolve that argument; it sharpens it. The question of which kind of expertise London traffic actually rewards, memorized human knowledge or AI trained on simulation and real-world miles at scale, will be one of the more meaningful real-world tests of autonomous capability to watch over the next two years. The Uber precedent suggests the incumbents are right to be concerned.