A black Jaguar SUV with no one behind the wheel pulls up on a London street. It’s electric and equipped with Waymo’s autonomous driving system. A passenger gets in, selects a destination on their phone, and the car pulls smoothly into traffic. Within the next few years, this scene could move from novelty to normality as Waymo, Google’s parent company Alphabet’s self-driving car division, plans to launch its robotaxi service in the UK capital, with testing already underway and a pilot service scheduled for April 2026. The arrival of driverless ride-hailing would not simply mark a technological milestone. It could also test whether autonomous mobility can ever become a profitable business. London is already one of Europe’s largest markets for app-based transport: Transport for London licenses more than 100,000 private-hire drivers, while millions of journeys are booked each week through platforms such as Uber and Bolt. Waymo’s expansion reflects a broader industrial shift already visible in parts of the United States. In cities such as San Francisco and Phoenix, robotaxis are already carrying fare-paying passengers on digitally booked journeys. Each trip is not just a ride but a real-world test of whether its business model holds up. Vehicles or software? At stake is a bigger question about where the value sits: in the companies that build the vehicles, or those that write the software that drives them? And the question is not confined to cars. When software becomes the core of a product, the balance of power tends to move with it — as smartphone makers learned when profits flowed to the firms behind the operating systems. Waymo’s story is a lesson in digital strategy. When software becomes the core of a product, the winners are not necessarily the best manufacturers. They are the ones with the best code, and