As I arrive, he’s laying out an impressive lunch spread of salads and carved ham and huge blocks of good cheese. There are already 385 mouths to feed in London alone, and almost 450 staff in total now, including at the new US headquarters and testing base Wayve has just opened in Sunnyvale, California: Its first public use of the Softbank cash. It might have flown under the radar until that headline-making funding round in May, but this start-up started up in 2017, and like most overnight successes has been a long time in the making.
That investment was seen as a clear sign that self-driving cars are emerging from the “trough of disillusionment” so common in tech when hype has to translate into application. Some of the biggest and best-funded companies admitted that autonomy was the toughest problem they were working on. Too tough, in some cases: Among many others, Apple, Uber and Volkswagen have quit AV programs in recent years.
But there’s a new optimism around autonomy. In addition to the Wayve deal, Alphabet’s Waymo is now giving 150,000 driverless rides each week in San Francisco, LA and Phoenix, and has just announced its expansion to Austin and Atlanta from early next year. Autonomous trucking service Aurora will make its first driverless trips soon in Texas. Tesla has finally shown the Cybercab, even if its half-hour launch event was disappointingly light on detail. Mate Rimac’s autonomous ride-hailing service Verne, which uses pretty, bespoke two-seat coupes with no steering wheel or pedals launches in Zagreb next year, with at least a dozen more cities already signed up.
Wayve may not have anything like Waymo’s scale, budget, or miles driven. But it does have Alex Kendall, who has that same early-Elon combination of messianic vision, drive, and an ability to “get into the weeds” of the problem himself. And Wayve takes a fundamentally different, purely AI approach to autonomy compared to Waymo, one which which might allow it to scale up far faster and roll out more widely than its rivals.
“In 2017, when we started Wayve, we were at peak hype cycle for autonomous cars,” Kendall tells me. “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 all dream of. They thought of self-driving as an infrastructure and a hand-coded robotics problem. I thought of it as an AI problem.”
