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

As he arrived, he laid out an impressive meal of salads and carved ham and huge blocks of good cheese. There are already 385 mouths to feed in London alone, and almost 450 staff in total now, including the new US headquarters and testing base Wayve just opened in Sunnyvale, California – Its first public use of Softbank money . It might have flown under the radar until that headline funding round in May, but this startup started in 2017, and like most overnight successes it’s been around for a long time.

That investment was seen as a clear sign that self-driving cars are emerging from the “pit of disillusionment“So common in technology when the hype has to translate into application. Some of the largest and most funded companies admit that autonomy was the hardest problem they were working on. Too hard, in some cases: Among many others, AppleUber and Volkswagen have dropped AV programs in recent years.

But there is new optimism around autonomy. In addition to the Wayve deal, Alphabet’s Waymo it now gives 150,000 driverless rides every week in San Francisco, LA, and Phoenix, and just announced its expansion to Austin and Atlanta early next year, and Miami by early 2026. Self-driving truck service Dawn will soon make its first driverless trips in Texas. Tesla finally showed the Cybercabalthough its half-hour launch event was disappointingly light on detail. Mate Rimac’s autonomous transport service Vernewhich uses good, custom-made two-seater coupes without steering wheels or pedals, is launching in Zagreb next year, with at least a dozen cities already signed up.

Wayve may not have anything like the scale, budget, or miles driven of Waymo. But it has Alex Kendall, who has the same principle-Elon combination of messianic vision, drive, and the ability to “get into the weeds” of the problem itself. And Wayve is taking a fundamentally different, purely AI approach to autonomy compared to Waymo, one that could allow it to scale much faster and spread more widely than its rivals.

“In 2017, when we started Wayve, we were in the hype cycle for self-driving cars,” Kendall tells me. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, this is a year away, and it’s going to be magical.’ we dream. They think of self-driving as an infrastructure and hand-coded robotics problem. I think of it as an AI problem.”