When I arrive, he lays out an impressive packed lunch of salads, sliced ham and huge blocks of good cheese. In London alone, there are 385 mouths to feed, and a total of almost 450 employees, including at the new US headquarters and testing base that Wayve just opened in Sunnyvale, California: the first public use of Softbank money. It may have flown under the radar until its major funding round in May, but this startup started in 2017 and, like most overnight successes, has been a long time coming.
That investment was seen as a clear sign that self-driving cars are emerging from the “valley of disillusionment” so common in the technology sector when hype must translate into application. Some of the largest and best-funded companies admitted that autonomy was the most difficult problem they were working on. In some cases too heavy: Apple, Uber and Volkswagen, among others, have stopped AV programs in recent years.
But there is a new optimism around autonomy. In addition to the Wayve deal, Alphabet's Waymo now offers 150,000 driverless rides every week in San Francisco, LA and Phoenix, and just announced expansion into Austin and Atlanta starting early next year. Autonomous trucking service Aurora will soon make its first driverless trips in Texas. Tesla has finally shown off the Cybercab, even if the half-hour launch event was disappointingly short on details. Mate Rimac's Verne autonomous taxi service, which uses sleek, custom-made two-seater coupes without a steering wheel or pedals, will launch in Zagreb next year, with at least a dozen other cities already signed up.
Wayve may not have anything like Waymo's scale, budget or mileage. But there is Alex Kendall, who has the same early Elon combination of messianic vision, drive and the ability to get 'into the weeds' of the problem himself. And Wayve takes a fundamentally different, purely AI approach to autonomy compared to Waymo, allowing it to scale and deploy more widely than its rivals much faster.
“In 2017, when we started Wayve, we were at the height of the autonomous car hype cycle,” says Kendall. “Everyone was like, '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 just wasn't going to give us this future of intelligent machines that we were all going to have.” They viewed self-driving as an infrastructure and a hand-coded robotics problem.”
