Self-driving vehicles: The UK is ready to join the global race
Wayve has raised $1 billion to put its self-driving software into modern cars. The funding mostly came from existing investors including Microsoft, Nvidia and Softbank, and it came just days before the UK also passed a comprehensive law that will let driverless cars onto British roads by 2026. The regulations are the first to address one of the industry’s big problems: exaggeration.
The UK’s Automated Vehicles Act has a section titled, “Communications likely to confuse as to autonomous capability," which bans companies from creating confusion over whether their cars can drive themselves. It’s a sharp but subtle policy that the industry has long needed, given how much puffery has raised expectations that the industry has failed to deliver on. Among his many pronouncements, Musk once tweeted that Tesla cars would self-drive as well as humans by 2021, the same year Ford also predicted it would sell cars without steering wheels.
Both were wrong. “How you set and meet expectations to the customer is really important," says Alex Kendall, Wayve’s chief executive officer. Kendall, who’s originally from New Zealand, co-founded the company in 2017 while studying at Cambridge University for his PhD in deep learning, an approach to building artificial intelligence.
Cambridge has a legacy of AI breakthroughs from scientists like Alan Turing, but like the rest of the UK, its spin-offs have struggled to commercialize cutting-edge research in the same way Silicon Valley has. Wayve’s mega funding round, which was the biggest-ever for an AI company in Europe—even more than that of French AI hotshot Mistral—suggests Britain’s market for deep-tech startups may be starting to get the late-stage financing they need to grow. This raises hope
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