A new petition has been launched on the UK Parliament’s official petitions website calling on the Government to block the commercial rollout of driverless taxis and other autonomous passenger transport services, warning that the move could threaten the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of licensed drivers.
The petition, titled “Stop the introduction of driverless cars,” was created by Thomas Freitas and published on 10 August 2026. It calls on ministers to prohibit the commercial operation of fully driverless passenger transport services and to prevent operator licences being issued for autonomous taxi and private hire operations. In its wording, the petition states that driverless cars could threaten the livelihoods of over 400,000 licensed private hire and Hackney carriage drivers, and argues that the Government should prioritise protecting jobs and ensuring public safety before allowing commercial autonomous taxi services to go ahead.
As things stand, the petition has 235 signatures. It needs 10,000 before the Government is required to issue a formal response, and 100,000 before it can be considered for a debate in Parliament. It will remain open for signing until 10 February 2027.
This isn’t the trade’s first attempt to get the issue in front of MPs. An earlier petition on the same subject, warning that autonomous rollout could put over 300,000 private hire and black cab drivers out of work, has already been raised directly in the House of Commons, where MP Clive Efford pressed the Department for Transport on the issue during a Business of the House session. The higher figure quoted in this new petition lines up with the Department for Transport’s own numbers — as of April 2024, there were 381,100 licensed taxi and PHV driver licences in England alone, the highest total on record, before Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are even factored in.
The backdrop to all of this is the Automated Vehicles Act 2024, which set the legal framework for driverless vehicles to operate on UK roads and shifted liability for accidents away from the human occupant and onto the vehicle manufacturer. Pilot schemes for commercial driverless taxi and bus services were fast-tracked under that Act, and from spring 2026, firms have been permitted to run small-scale operations on English roads without a safety driver behind the wheel. Uber has already confirmed plans for an autonomous rollout, expected to begin in September 2026 subject to government approval, while Waymo continues to run trials of its own driverless taxis on London’s streets.
For drivers reading this, the petition is a reminder that the debate over autonomous taxis isn’t going away — and that getting your voice heard through the official channels is one of the few direct ways to influence how fast, and under what conditions, this technology is allowed onto UK roads.
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