Looking to deliver a pre‑integrated advanced driver assistance and automated driving system (ADAS/AD) for automakers, connected vehicle technology company Wayve has announced a technical collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies.
Technology-wise, the partnership will aim to see Wayve AI Driver deployed as an end‑to‑end driving intelligence layer for customers using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Ride Platform and active safety software.
Seeing use in all levels of assisted and self-driving technology, the Wayve AI Driver data‑driven artificial intelligence (AI) software stack learns driving behaviour directly from large‑scale real‑world data, supporting adaptable performance across regions, road types and driving environments.
Snapdragon Ride consists of system on chips (SoCs) and active safety software, delivering a pre‑integrated system that enables regulatory and hands-off ADAS deployment, expanding to broader driving environments and eyes-off capabilities.
The integration is intended to help automakers accelerate time to market and efficiently deliver scalable, reliable solutions across vehicle models and tiers. Moreover, offering simplified implementation and meeting priorities around safety, reliability, scalability and time to market, the collaboration is generating strong interest from automakers.
By reducing the integration complexity of bringing together the SoC, active safety systems and AI Driver, the two technology firms assured that automakers can implement advanced, reliable ADAS/AD faster and with “less time and effort”. The system is also engineered to support global deployment and long‑term vehicle lifecycle and platform strategies.
Such an open approach seeks to increase flexibility while reducing cost, complexity and risk as compared to fragmented and closed approaches. This, combined with scalability, is said to allow automakers to standardise across platforms and regions while retaining the ability to differentiate brand experiences and model tiers.
“ADAS is where scale, safety and real‑world impact matter most for automakers today,” said Anshuman Saxena, vice-president and general manager for ADAS and robotics at Qualcomm Technologies. “Together with Wayve, we’re empowering automakers with more choice for how advanced driving systems are developed, deployed and scaled, while also helping them reduce development cycles, effort and risk.”
Wayve AI Driver is designed as a flexible, vehicle-agnostic software that serves as the intelligence layer for autonomy for any vehicle, anywhere, according to Alex Kendall, co‑founder and CEO of Wayve. “Our collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies provides global automakers building on Snapdragon Ride with a streamlined path to deploy market-leading, end-to-end AI automated driving capability alongside Qualcomm’s active safety stack,” said Kendall.
“By combining our embodied AI driving intelligence with Qualcomm Technologies’ compute performance, platform maturity and global scale, we are expanding choice and delivering immediate value to automakers across ADAS and automated driving systems, with natural progression from hands-off to eyes-off operation,” he added.
As part of the collaboration, Qualcomm Technologies and Wayve also intend to explore opportunities to use Qualcomm SoCs in future Level 4 (L4) robotaxi applications.
