In one of the first moves of its kind, driverless car company, Waymo, has warned against the UK imposing strict rules for self-driving vehicles.

The company has submitted comments to a Law Commission consultation about how laws for driverless cars should be written, urging against measures that would limit deployment of the vehicles.

It’s a sign that Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, is willing to take a more interventionist approach when it comes to policy-making with regards to driverless cars.

The current laws, which seek to enable self-driving cars on British roads later this year, will – as well as limiting the number of cars on the road – cap them at 37 miles per hour.

In its submission, Waymo warns against the commission’s suggestions that regulations for driverless cars in Britain should impose any kind of strict regulations approved by a patchwork of local regulators.

Waymo first offered driverless taxis to customers in Phoenix, Arizona in 2020.

In a statement to the Law Commission, the company said: “The UK’s national approval framework should not create limited use cases or inhibit deployment.”

Waymo is concerned that placing limits on deployment, as is suggested in the consultation paper, either by number of geography, would do just this,” they add.

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Waymo bought Latent Logic, an ­artificial intelligence company spun out of the University of Oxford, in 2019, and hired Ben Loewenstein, a London-based policy manager for Europe earlier this year.

Lowenstein says: “The Law Commission’s conclusion that the ultimate decision to assess acceptable risk is a political one implies that there is a large degree of subjectivity involved in that process. We believe this decision should be made as objectively as possible.”

He adds: “We commend the Law Commission for taking a proactive approach to developing rules for autonomous vehicle deployment, and support their efforts to focus on fully autonomous operation without a human driver.”

The framework that they are seeking to establish would create a uniform national safety approval process and enable both AV developers and auto manufacturers alike to deploy this life-saving technology, while accelerating access to it in the UK.”