When I arrived, he had laid out an impressive lunch featuring salad, chopped ham, and a huge block of delicious cheese. There are already 385 locations in London alone, and including Wave’s new U.S. headquarters and testing site in Sunnyvale, Calif., the company now has a total of about 450 staff. SoftBank’s cash will be used publicly for the first time. It may have flown under the radar until its headline-grabbing funding round in May, but the startup was founded in 2017, and like many overnight successes, it took a long time to come to fruition. .
This investment was seen as a clear sign that self-driving cars were emerging from “society.”valley of disillusionment” It is common in the technology industry when hype needs to be translated into applications. Some of the largest and most well-funded companies have admitted that autonomy is the most difficult problem they are grappling with. In some cases, it’s too strict: Apple, Uber, and Volkswagen, among others, have discontinued their AV programs in recent years.
But there is a new optimism about autonomy. In addition to the deal with Wayve, Alphabet’s Waymo currently conducts 150,000 driverless rides each week in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, and just announced expansion to Austin and Atlanta starting early next year. Self-driving truck transportation service aurora The company will soon conduct its first unmanned trip in Texas. Tesla has finally unveiled its CyberCab, even though the 30-minute unveiling event was disappointingly light on details. Mate Rimac’s Verne autonomous ride-hailing service, which uses cute custom-built two-seater coupes with no steering wheel or pedals, will launch in Zagreb next year, and at least a dozen more cities have already signed up.
Wayve may not have the scale, budget, or mileage of Waymo. But then there’s Alex Kendall. He has the same messianic vision, drive, and ability to get “into the weeds” of his problems as early Elon. And Wayve takes a fundamentally different, purely AI-driven approach to autonomy than Waymo, which could allow it to scale up much faster and deploy more broadly than its competitors.
“When we launched Wayve in 2017, the self-driving car hype cycle was at its peak,” Kendall said. “Everyone thought, “Oh, one more year is magical.” But the technological approach that most people were taking was not delivering the intelligent machine future that we all want. It turns out it can’t be done. They thought of autonomous driving as an infrastructure problem, and I thought of it as an AI problem.”
