Wayve: London robotaxis will make passengers forget there’s no driver

Wayve believes Londoners will stop noticing they are sitting in driverless cars within minutes of using them, as the British AI startup prepares to launch autonomous vehicles on Uber’s network in the capital.

Katie Fisher, Wayve’s vice president of commercial and operations, said the company expected passengers to move quickly from novelty to habit once its self-driving vehicles begin carrying members of the public.

“At the beginning when people have never experienced autonomy, they get in the car, they are taking videos of the wheel, they are hyper-focused,” Fisher said at SXSW on Monday.

“About three minutes in, they’re doing the exact same thing that we all do in any other ride-hail, they’re back on their phone.”

Wayve, founded in Cambridge in 2017 before moving to London, is one of Britain’s most valuable AI startups and has been operating vehicles on the capital’s roads since 2019.

Fisher said the company was now close to moving from testing to public use: “The really exciting thing that’s happening this year is we will be launching our autonomous vehicles to the public on the Uber network”.

“That’ll be happening imminently, which is an exciting step after a long journey.”

The launch will be closely watched by ministers and investors, after Wayve raised $1.5bn earlier this year from backers including Softbank, Nvidia, Microsoft, Uber, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis.

The company has also signed a strategic partnership with Stellantis to integrate its AI driving software into future vehicles, with the first North American deployment planned for 2028.

Wayve’s bet is that autonomous driving will not be rolled out city-by-city through tightly mapped robotaxi fleets alone, but through software that can be built directly into vehicles and adapted across different markets.

“We integrate our technology directly with automotive manufacturers, which means that vehicles will come off the assembly line with already a model in it, already the safety features, which allows scale,” Fisher said.

She added that Wayve’s cars now run “24/7, 365 in London, in the US, Tokyo, as well as Germany”.

London as a stress test

Unlike many rivals, Wayve says its tech does not rely on high-definition maps or restricted geo-fenced areas.

“We don’t need HD AV1-0 maps or high-definition maps, which means we don’t operate within a geofence,” Fisher said. “This is really unique in the L4 autonomous vehicle industry.”

Instead, the firm uses what it calls end-to-end AI, a single driving intelligence which contrasts with earlier approaches based on hand-coded rules.

“In AV1.0, you use hand-coded rules. So, if this, then that,” she said. “What we’ve discovered over the years is that when you use a hand-coded approach, it’s what we call brittle.”

“London has 2,000-year-old streets,” Fisher said. “There is no grid system… there’s a lot of jaywalkers and other obstacles. No easy solution if you’re going to deploy in London.”

She said the capital has “20 times the amount of dynamic construction” compared with San Francisco and “10 times the number of vulnerable road users”, including pedestrians and cyclists.

“It means that we’re learning on the most complex and the hardest use case first”.

The company tested its vehicles across more than 500 cities last year, including North America, the UK, Europe and Japan, without first collecting local data or mapping each city in detail.

The UK government has sought to position Wayve as proof that Britain can build and retain major AI companies.

Last month, the Department for Business and Trade signed an agreement with the firm to support research into self-driving technology and help move automated vehicles from prototype to commercial services on UK roads.

Fisher said regulation had been one of Britain’s strengths: “The UK is the first country in the world to have a nationwide structure for getting autonomous vehicles on the road.”

“In other countries, in the States, it’s state by state, and often city by city. The UK putting in infrastructure that allows developers to know with confidence that they have a path to put autonomous vehicles on the road… that’s huge.”

Wayve has also joined PAVE UK alongside Nissan and Uber to support public education around self-driving vehicles, as the industry attempts to build trust ahead of wider deployment.