When I arrive, he’s preparing an impressive lunch of salads, carved ham, and huge blocks of good cheese. In London alone, there are already 385 people to feed and a total of almost 450 employees, including at the modern US headquarters and test base that Wayve has just opened in Sunnyvale, California: this is the first public operate of Softbank’s cash. It may have gone unnoticed until that round of funding that made headlines in May, but this startup launched in 2017 and, like most overnight successes, was a long time in the making.
This investment was considered a clear signal that autonomous cars are emerging from the “revolution”trough of disappointment” so common in technology when hype needs to be translated into application. Some of the largest and best-funded companies admitted that autonomy was the most complex problem they had worked on. Too complex in some cases: In recent years, Apple, Uber and Volkswagen, among others, have all abandoned AV programs.
But there is modern optimism around autonomy. In addition to the Wayve deal, Alphabet-owned Waymo currently provides 150,000 driverless rides per week in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix and just announced expansion into Austin and Atlanta starting early next year. Autonomous transport service Northern lights will soon take its first driverless trip in Texas. Tesla finally showed off the Cybercab, even though its half-hour launch was disappointingly lacking in detail. Mate Rimac’s Verne autonomous passenger transport service, which uses a handsome, custom-made two-seat coupe without a steering wheel or pedals, will launch in Zagreb next year, and at least a dozen other cities are already signed up.
Wayve may not have the scale, budget and miles traveled of Waymo. But he has Alex Kendall, who has the same combination of messianic vision, drive, and the ability to “get into the weeds” of a problem that early Elon had. Wayve has a fundamentally different, AI-only approach to autonomy compared to Waymo, which could allow it to scale much faster and deploy more widely than its rivals.
“In 2017, when we founded Wayve, we were at the height of the autonomous car hype,” Kendall tells me. “Everyone said, ‘Oh, it’s next year and it’ll be magical.’ However, I saw that the technological approach that most were taking would not give us the future of knowledgeable machines that we all know we have dreamed of. They thought of autonomous driving as an infrastructure problem and a hand-coded robotics problem, I thought of it as an artificial intelligence problem.