who drive taxis for hire in the UK is about 100,000. However, Steve McNamara, general secretary of the 10,500-strong London Taxi Drivers’ Association, said: “You won’t get these driverless cars in London for 20 or 25 years. Maybe, by then, they’ll have a charge point – because there isn’t a single one in London now.” Other car makers, including Volvo, Ford and Mercedes, are working on driver-assisted vehicles, which, unlike Google’s version, do not dispense with the driver controls. But Chris Urmson, director of the self-driving car project at Google, said that the new prototypes dispensed with the steering wheel and brakes because there was no guarantee that a human occupant would be able to take over in an emergency, and that it was simpler just to have an emergency stop button. Urmson said: “The vehicles will be very basic. We want to learn from them and adapt them as quickly as possible. But they will take you where you want to go at the push of a button. And, that’s an important step towards improving road safety and transforming mobility for millions of people.” So far, the Google versions of the self-driving cars have covered 700,000 miles without an accident caused by the computer. The company points out that thousands of people die each year on the roads and that about 80% of crashes can be ascribed to human error. But, they could have some