Europe’s buzzy self-driving AV startup is about to face a new challenge — driving on the opposite side of the road. London-based Wayve has ambitious plans for global expansion after receiving backing from Microsoft, Nvidia, and SoftBank.
From an article in Business Insider India by Tom Carter.
The company announced in October that it would start testing its advanced driver assist technology in California, joining Waymo and Amazon-backed Zoox in driving on public roads in the US.
That will see its vehicles face a similar headache to human drivers traveling across the Atlantic — switching from UK roads, where cars drive on the left rather than the right.
“There’s going to be some new challenges, whether it’s driving on the right side of the road, four-way stop signs, or right turn on a red. These are things that we don’t have in the UK,” Alex Kendall, Wayve’s CEO, told Business Insider in an interview.
Wayve’s self-driving software is trained on the streets of London and other UK cities, known for being narrower and more crowded than the wide-open roads of California.
But the startup, which recently raised over $1 billion from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia, is confident that it can make the leap.
Wayve’s fleet of Ford Mach-Es uses an end-to-end AI model that learns how to drive from real-world testing and simulations.
That’s a different approach from companies like Waymo, which rely on radar systems like lidar and high-precision mapping to limit their vehicles to operating in certain areas.
Tesla has shunned lidar to rely exclusively on cameras and AI for its driver-assist systems, with Elon Musk previously calling lidar a “crutch.” Tesla still spent at least $2 million on the technology in the first quarter of 2024, though it is unclear what it was used for.
Wayve has taken a different approach. Rather than building its own robotaxi fleet, the company plans to license its software to different automakers. Kendall said this would give Wayve a crucial advantage over firms like Waymo, which currently only operate in certain cities.
“I think the way that the way that autonomy will succeed at scale is through a system that has the intelligence to make decisions itself. And a geofenced approach fundamentally limits the utility of such a system,” said Kendall.
Ultimately, Kendall said that autonomous vehicles will only have their “ChatGPT moment” once they expand beyond specially modified robotaxis into everyday consumer vehicles.
“I would argue that getting this into consumer vehicles is what’s going lead to that experience. It’s not constrained, geofenced, affluent robotaxi models,” he said.
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