UK Safety and Accessibility Experts Ride with Waymo Ahead of Its London Launch
As a blind person, Robin Spinks always dreamed of being able to travel independently in a vehicle. With Waymo announcing its fully autonomous ride-hailing service is bound for London in 2026, that hope will soon become a reality.
“How often do you have a dream, and then you have an experience that is the realisation of that dream?” Spinks marvelled during a recent journey in a Waymo vehicle. “That’s incredible.”
Spinks, who is Head of Inclusive Design at the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), advises some of the world’s leading companies on designing products that serve people with disabilities. He was one of two leading UK experts in accessible product design and road safety who recently flew to Atlanta, Georgia, to experience Waymo’s technology first-hand before its UK launch. He was accompanied by Dr. Suzy Charman, executive director of the UK charity Road Safety Foundation.
Following their rides, both Spinks and Charman gave Waymo high marks. Spinks believes Waymo’s technology can help nearly two million people in the UK who are blind or partially sighted, which is expected to double by 2050. Charman lauds Waymo’s technology as a valuable tool to help address a UK road trauma that has claimed around five lives per day for the last ten years.
Robin enjoys a comfortable ride through Atlanta in a Waymo, demonstrating how autonomous vehicles can support independent travel.
“It represents a new dawn in mobility, not just for those of us with vision loss, but I think for anybody—it represents a whole new way of thinking about getting around,” said Spinks.
Charman, who holds a PhD in cognitive psychology and has studied and advocated for a safe road transport system in the UK and internationally for the last 20 years, said Waymo can help move the needle when it comes to reducing fatalities on UK roads.
“It’s absolutely gutting that we're still seeing so many people killed or seriously injured on our roads because we know the solutions,” Charman said. “We need a road safety strategy, and we need targets—but we also need new technologies and approaches to ramp up that change so that we lose fewer people.”
The key, Charman emphasised, is reducing the likelihood of collisions by minimising the number of people driving while impaired or sleepy, and making sure that speeds are managed well, and, while we work on this we also have to make sure that vehicle safety standards progress well and that road layouts are both self explaining and forgiving when collisions happen. The protection of the system in the event of a collision is really important when we recognise the fallibility of normal human cognition - the way perception, attention and judgement work mean errors or mistakes will always happen.
“Waymo is not going to be driving drunk, it's not going to be on its phone, it's not going to be inattentive,” Charman said. “It can cope with a lot more information than the human brain can.”
Waymo is designed to carry out all the tasks of a human driver while respecting other road users, following traffic laws like speed limits, and using a sophisticated “vision system” comprising LiDAR, radar, cameras, microphones, and computers to stay constantly vigilant and make safe driving decisions.
“(Waymo) was responding in ways that built my trust time and time again and by the end of it, I was quite relaxed,” Charman said of her Waymo ride. “I could see with the pedestrian movements that the system was picking [them] up really well.”
Suzy sits in the back seat of a Waymo vehicle, demonstrating how autonomous technology prioritizes passenger safety and security.
As of July 2025, Waymo has driven 100 million miles on public roads without a single fatality and new research shows that Waymo is actually making roads safer in the cities in which it operates.
“Certainly the experience I’ve had today tells me we can actually crack this and move towards a safe road system for everybody,” Charman said about Waymo. “This gives us an extra boost.”
Spinks said that riding with Waymo was a transformative experience for him too.
“I think when you get into the car and you experience just how simple and intuitive using it is—and how enjoyable it is—I think that will change people's perceptions,” Spinks said. “My confidence grew very quickly when I could see the car negotiating, navigating a whole range of different situations and doing that really smoothly.”
With input and guidance from members of the Waymo Accessibility Network, which is made up of charities serving disabled people and their advocates, Waymo has added accessibility features to its app and every aspect of its passenger experience.
“We recently commissioned a survey and one of the findings was that more than half of blind and partially sighted people want to get out more than they actually do,” Spinks said, adding that Waymo also offers a promising solution to the issue of blind people being refused rides because they are accompanied by guide dogs, which he hears about daily.
“Waymo is not going to be rude or have a false understanding of what a service animal is, and it's not going to cancel the trip when it spots that the person has a guide dog,” Spinks said.
Charman said Waymo gives her hope her 10-year-old son will be safer on UK roads as he begins walking to school by himself and, one day, driving.
“I'm really hopeful that some of the concerns that I might feel now will start to be mitigated as we see vehicle technologies and autonomous vehicles emerging in the United Kingdom,” Charman said. “I'm hopeful that we have a better future for our children.”
