When I arrive, he is preparing an impressive lunch for me with salads, sliced ham, and huge blocks of good cheese. There are already 385 mouths to feed in London alone, and almost 450 employees in total, including at the new US headquarters and test base that Wayve just opened in Sunnyvale, California – its first public use of Softbank cash. It may have flown under the radar until that headline-grabbing funding round in May, but this startup started in 2017 and, like most overnight successes, has been a long time in the making.
That investment was seen as a clear sign that autonomous vehicles are emerging from the “valley of disappointment”So common in technology when hype has to be translated into application. Some of the largest and best-funded companies admitted that autonomy was the most difficult problem they were working on. Too harsh in some cases: among many others, Apple, Uber and Volkswagen have abandoned AV programs in recent years.
But there is new optimism around autonomy. In addition to the deal with Wayve, Alphabet’s Waymo now offers 150,000 driverless rides each week in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, and just announced its expansion to Austin and Atlanta starting early next year. Autonomous transportation service Aurora will soon make its first self-driving trips in Texas. Tesla finally showed off the Cybercab, even if its half-hour launch event was disappointingly short on details. Mate Rimac’s Verne autonomous shuttle service, which uses cute, custom-made two-seat coupes without steering wheels or pedals, will launch in Zagreb next year, and at least a dozen more cities are already signed up.
Wayve may not have anything close to the scale, budget, or miles driven of Waymo. But it does have Alex Kendall, who has the same combination of messianic vision, drive and the ability to “get into the weeds” of the problem. And Wayve takes a fundamentally different, purely AI approach to autonomy compared to Waymo, one that could allow it to scale much faster and deploy more widely than its rivals.
“In 2017, when we started Wayve, we were at the peak of the hype cycle for self-driving cars,” Kendall tells me. “Everyone was saying, ‘Oh, this is a year away and it’s going to be magical.’ But I could see that the technological approach that most were taking was just not going to give us this future of intelligent machines that we all know. They dream. They thought about driving autonomous as an infrastructure and a hand-coded robotics problem.