Wayve’s AI self-driving system is here to drive like a human and compete with Waymo and Tesla

When I arrived, he was laying out an impressive lunch of salad, chopped ham, and huge blocks of delicious cheese. In London alone there are 385 mouths to feed and a total of nearly 450 employees, including the new US headquarters and the newly opened Wayve testing facility in Sunnyvale, California: The company’s first use of Softbank cash publicly. It may have flown under the radar until its headline-grabbing funding round in May, but the startup got its start in 2017, and like most overnight successes, it took a while. takes a long time to form.

That investment is seen as a clear sign that self-driving cars are emerging from “trough disillusionment” is very common in technology when hype must translate into application. Some of the largest and best-funded companies admit that autonomy is the most difficult problem they are solving. Too difficult in some cases: Among many others, AppleUber and Volkswagen have abandoned AV programs in recent years.

But there is a new optimism around autonomy. In addition to the Wayve deal, Alphabet Waymo currently offers 150,000 driverless rides per week in San Francisco, LA and Phoenix, and has just announced expansion to Austin and Atlanta starting early next year. Self-propelled transportation service aurora will soon conduct its first driverless rides in Texas. Tesla finally showed Cybercabeven if its half-hour launch event was disappointingly low on detail. Mate Rimac’s self-driving car calling service Verneusing sleek two-seat coupes without a steering wheel or pedals will launch in Zagreb next year, with at least a dozen more cities already signed up.

Wayve may not have anything like the scale, budget or mileage that Waymo has aimed for. But it has Alex Kendall, who also has that early-Elon the combination of vision, messianic drive, and the ability to “weed out” problems yourself. And Wayve takes a fundamentally different, pure AI approach to autonomy than Waymo, an approach that could allow it to scale much faster and deploy more widely than opponents.

“In 2017, when we founded Wayve, we were at peak hype for self-driving cars,” Kendall told me. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, it’s a year away, and it’s going to be amazing.’ But I can see that the technological approach that most people are taking is not going to give us the future.” hybrid of intelligent machines that we are all adopting.” their dream. They think of self-driving as an infrastructure and a hand-coded robotics problem. I think it’s an AI problem.”