People in London could be hiring driverless taxis from Waymo next year, after the US autonomous vehicle company announced plans to launch its services there.

The UK capital will become the first European city to have an autonomous taxi service of the kind now familiar in San Francisco and four other US cities using Waymo’s technology.

The launch pits an innovation sometimes dubbed the “robotaxi” against London’s famous black cabs, which can trace their history back to the first horse-drawn hackney coaches of the Tudor era.

But a representative of the capital’s cab drivers said they were not concerned by the arrival of a “fairground ride” and questioned the reliability of driverless vehicles.

Waymo said its cars were now on their way to London and would start driving on the capital’s streets in the coming weeks with “trained human specialists”, or safety drivers, behind the wheel.

The company, originally formed as a spin-off from Google’s self-driving car programme, said it would scale up operations and work closely with Transport for London and the Department for Transportto obtain the permits needed to offer fully autonomous rides in 2026.

Uber and the UK tech company Wayve have also announced their own plans to trial their driverless taxis in the capital next year, after the British government said it would accelerate rules allowing public trials to take place before legislation enabling self-driving vehicles passes in full.

The transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, said: “I’m delighted that Waymo intends to bring their services to London next year, under our proposed piloting scheme.

“Boosting the AV [autonomous vehicle] sector will increase accessible transport options alongside bringing jobs, investment and opportunities to the UK. Cutting-edge investment like this will help us deliver our mission to be world leaders in new technology and spearhead national renewal.”

A fuller rollout of self-driving taxis is expected in the UK after the Automated Vehicles Act fully takes effect in late 2027.

Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association, which represents black-cab drivers, known in the city as “cabbies”, said: “It’s a fairground ride.

“It’s a tourist attraction in San Francisco. Quite frequently one of them will lock up in the middle of a junction because it gets confused and the police have to come and park, wait for the Waymo man to get his laptop out and get it going again.”

He said London would pose a bigger challenge for Waymo, due to its irregular road system. He added that he did not believe there was public appetite for the technology.

“If there was demand for it, Nigel Farage would be saying get rid of immigrants, have driverless cars instead. But there’s no demand for it.”

He said ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft might welcome the technology because it would reduce the cost of hiring drivers.

Waymo, part of the Alphabet group that also owns Google, already has ties to Britain after opening its first European engineering hub in Oxford in 2019. It is also launching services in Tokyo using Jaguar Land Rover electric vehicles, its only other current venture outside the US.

Its co-chief executive Tekedra Mawakana said the technology was “making roads safer and transportation more accessible”, adding: “We’ve demonstrated how to responsibly scale fully autonomous ride-hailing, and we can’t wait to expand the benefits of our technology to the United Kingdom.”

Waymo launched its autonomous taxis in 2020 and has amassed a fleet of more than 2,000 driverless vehicles. It says it has taken more than 10 million passengers in the US, offering services in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

London would become the only European city in which the company is operational, pending approval from central government and Transport for London.

Despite some alarming incidents, Waymo said the data showed that cars driven by humans were involved in incidents that injured pedestrians 12 times more often than its autonomous vehicles.

Its cars use cameras, artificial intelligence, radar and lidar – sensors that use lasers to measure distance in three dimensions – to create a map of objects around the vehicle, including in darkness and weather conditions such as rain.