‘Driverless cars are the hardest problem you could want to solve’ – Oxa’s Gavin Jackson

The head of the UK tech startup is as passionate about self-driving autonomy' as Elon Musk - but thinks it could be 20 years away

Driverless cars are here - if you happen to live in San Francisco, at least. Regulators voted last week to allow two companies to run driverless taxi services in the city. So it is surprising to hear from the British boss of an autonomous-car company that the next step - the dream of a car that can drive you anywhere - may still be a decade or more away.

Gavin Jackson, of British startup Oxa, says it could be 10 or even 20 years before an Uber effect" takes over and robo-taxis are capable of going anywhere without human intervention. It's just the hardest problem you could possibly want to solve, because the variables are infinite," he tells the Observer over lunch in London.