There is a certain magic in watching a steering wheel move without anyone touching it. Even better when the car navigates you safely around the crowded and chaotic streets of King’s Cross and Islington. Autonomous vehicles can radically improve driving experiences and safety outcomes. Your author was sold on the concept when in San Francisco last year. They’re coming to London soon.
Wayve was established in 2017 and has raised $2.8bn across four funding rounds. Investors who have backed Wayve’s vision for autonomous driving include ARM, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Uber and a handful of major auto manufacturers. The company’s approach to autonomous driving is radically different to that being developed by businesses such as Waymo. Wayve’s system uses end-to-end deep learning, training neural networks directly from real-world driving data, so the vehicle learns driving behaviour rather than following explicit rules or maps.
On a recent afternoon, your author travelled up to Wayve’s London headquarters – one of its six offices around the world – and saw the theory put into practice. In contrast to a Waymo, users might not even notice much difference between a Wayve vehicle and a conventional car. Sure, there are NVIDIA graphic processing units (GPUs) hidden away in the boot and a discreet camera/ sensor set, but that’s it. A human sat in the driver’s seat throughout our journey – a current regulatory requirement in London – but did not need to intervene at any stage.
London is a markedly more complex city for autonomous vehicles to navigate than San Francisco – perhaps by a factor of up to 20, suggested our host. London has a far older, non-grid layout with many multi-arm junctions and non-orthogonal streets, in contrast to the conventional US city structure. Consider also London’s high density of narrow priority streets, bus lanes with time-dependent rules and frequent temporary roadworks and diversions. Our vehicle drove for over 30 minutes and handled all the above as well as an unobservant pedestrian almost stepping in front of our vehicle.
Wayve says that its software is constantly self-learning and that there has been a meaningful improvement in the key performance indicators it tracks (such as number of human interventions per kilometres driven, expansion in use cases etc) in the last three years. The business has big ambitions. Wayve has already announced collaborations with Uber in and . Semi-autonomous vehicles from Nissan and Stellantis which embed Wayve’s software should be hitting the streets globally within the next two years. Watch this space, for Wayve is set to keep making waves, disrupting driving as we know it.
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