Wayve’s AI Self-Driving System Is Here to Drive Like a Human and Take On Waymo and Tesla

When I arrived, he was setting out an impressive lunch of salad, sliced ​​ham, and chunks of prime cheese. There are already 385 people to feed in London alone, and there are currently nearly 450 employees, including Wayve’s new U.S. headquarters and testing facility that it just opened in Sunnyvale, California – the first public use of SoftBank’s cash. It may have flown under the radar until its headline-grabbing funding round in May, but the startup launched in 2017 and, like most overnight successes, has been a long time in the making.

The investment is seen as self-driving cars are moving from “the trough of disillusionmentThis is common in the tech world when hype has to translate into applications. Some of the largest and best-funded companies admit that autonomy is the toughest problem they are solving. In some cases too hard: in many other cases, appleUber and Volkswagen have abandoned AV plans in recent years.

But there is a new optimism surrounding autonomy. In addition to the Wayve deal, Alphabet’s Waymo It currently provides 150,000 driverless rides per week in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, and just announced expansion to Austin and Atlanta early next year, and to Miami starting in early 2026. aurora The first driverless tours will soon be taking place in Texas. Tesla finally shows off Network cabalthough its half-hour presentation was disappointing in its detail. Mate Rimac’s self-driving ride-hailing service Vernewhich uses a handsome bespoke two-seat coupe without a steering wheel or pedals, will launch in Zagreb next year, with at least a dozen other cities already signed up.

Wayve may not have the scale, budget or driving range of Waymo. But it does have Alex Kendall, who had the same experience early on—Elon A combination of messianic vision, drive and the ability to “dig into” a problem personally. Wayve takes a fundamentally different, purely artificial intelligence approach to automation than Waymo, which could allow it to scale faster and more broadly than its rivals.

“When we started Wayve in 2017, we were at the peak of the self-driving car hype cycle,” Kendall told me. “Everyone says, ‘Oh, there’s another year and it’s going to be magical.'” But I can see that the approach to technology that most people are taking isn’t going to give us the future of smart machines we all dream of. They view autonomous driving as an infrastructure and a hand-coded robotics problem. I think this is an artificial intelligence problem.