Robotaxis reached London's streets this month, and a British think tank already wants them taxed by the mile. The Centre for British Progress, a non-partisan group working on economic growth, has published a report urging ministers to introduce a charge on autonomous vehicles before the vehicles are common — partly to cushion the hit to the 417,000 taxi and private hire drivers in England, and partly to build a revenue line to replace fuel duty as it disappears. By 2050, the report calculates, a levy pitched at the social cost of congestion, around 88 pence a mile, would raise £47 billion a year.
Set that against the number it is meant to replace. Fuel duty brings the Treasury about £27 billion a year, and the shift to electric cars removes it. A mileage charge on autonomous vehicles at 88p, on the report's own arithmetic, does not restore £27 billion; it produces £47 billion, three quarters again as much. Presented as a replacement, it is a replacement plus a new tax of roughly £20 billion, and the report does not dwell on the difference.
The case for moving now is openly political, which is to its credit. There is not yet a large body of autonomous vehicle owners with an interest in resisting a new charge, and once that body exists the tax becomes far harder to impose. The window is narrow on the government's own numbers: it forecasts that up to 40% of cars sold could be autonomous by the middle of next decade. David Lawrence, one of the report's authors, reaches for fuel duty itself: introduced in 1909, before cars were widespread, rather than fought over after. He adds an argument aimed squarely at the Treasury rather than at drivers — financial markets price future revenue long before it arrives, so a levy peaking in 2050 could affect 30-year gilt yields and the government's fiscal headroom today.
The congestion numbers are the strongest part of the report. The Department for Transport forecasts that highly automated driving will raise total road mileage 24% by 2050, with material effects on congestion and average speeds. Owners of autonomous cars are likely to use them more often in place of public transport. And nearly half the mileage Waymo's robotaxis cover in California is driven with no passenger aboard. With no driver to pay, the cost of running empty is close to nothing, and circling the streets can come in cheaper than parking. That is the mechanism by which autonomy adds traffic even as it removes cars from driveways.
The jobs case is the report's stated motivation and its weakest link. It acknowledges what autonomy offers — better safety, new jobs requiring different skills — then asks ministers to prepare for what happens to 417,000 drivers in England, 121,000 of them in London, whose work the authors expect will largely cease to be necessary. The GMB union, which represents those drivers, does not dispute the threat. Simon Rush, who heads the union's London region drivers branch, says driverless cars endanger the earnings of private hire drivers and the businesses around them, and that the GMB has asked the government, Transport for London and the operators for a plan to retrain and redeploy drivers, and has received no answer. The union's verdict on the levy is that it might soften some of the economic damage but is not on its own enough.
Rush is pointing at the gap. A per-mile congestion charge prices road space; it does not compensate a displaced driver, and nothing in the proposal routes a pound of the £47 billion toward the people the report names in its opening argument. The instrument and the injury are two different things, joined by the word "transition".
Ministers, for their part, have backed autonomy as a transformative opportunity, saying this year's London robotaxi launch brings advanced technology onto British roads, creates thousands of jobs and delivers billions of pounds to the economy by 2035. Uber and Wayve have already begun a limited autonomous service in the capital. Google's Waymo and China's Baidu want in. Robotaxis run in the United States, China and the UAE, and Europe's first fully driverless taxi trials started this week in Zagreb.
Wayve's answer to the report is that an early sector-specific tax would punish the most promising British developers. Sarah Gates, the company's vice-president for international relations and compliance, calls autonomous transport a major growth opportunity, says the UK holds a genuine competitive advantage in the sector, and points to well-paid jobs and corporation tax receipts from a global market Wayve values at £700 billion, of which it expects a share.
That reply answers a different question from the one asked. A per-mile charge falls on whoever drives the miles, not on the firm that builds the software; "punishing developers" is a claim about how much demand survives the price, and Gates does not put a figure on it. Nor does Wayve engage with the 24% mileage forecast or the empty-running data, which is where the report's case actually sits. The growth argument and the congestion argument are not in contact.
Lawrence's 1909 precedent is sharper than he may intend. Fuel duty was easy to impose on a technology nobody was yet defending, and within a century it had become the tax no chancellor could raise without a fight, propping up budgets that had long since spent it. A congestion levy legislated now would be arriving at the same destination from the opposite direction: priced before the lobby exists, and defended by a Treasury that has already borrowed against receipts thirty years out — well before anyone has worked out what to do with the 417,000 drivers whose displacement is the reason it was proposed.