Wayve, the UK’s most valuable autonomous vehicle company, has successfully tested its AI adaptive driving model in US streets in a major milestone towards a wider rollout of self-driving vehicles.
The London-based group tested AV2.0, a foundational AI model it developed to allow autonomous vehicles to adapt to the driving behaviours of where it has been deployed, on American roads as part of its expansion to the US that kicked off last October.
Wayve described the model as a “universal backbone” for self-driving cars, making them adaptable to new environments and able to comfortably fit into different regions.
After collecting 500 hours of US driving data, the company said its autonomous vehicle software was able to adapt to the infrastructure, signage, traffic laws and human driver behaviour with an equivalently successful performance compared to its UK tests.
“Automakers need breakthrough AI technology that enables safe, seamless deployment of advanced assisted and automated driving across markets and vehicle platforms—without costly, time-intensive re-engineering,” said Wayve CEO Alex Kendall.
“These latest results highlight how our AV2.0 approach continues to improve with exposure to new environments, accelerating the path to intelligent driving automation at scale.”
As Europe’s top autonomous driving tech firm, Wayve has been casting a wide international net to support the development of its embodied AI with diverse data.
As well as its 2024 push into California, the company opened a testing and development facility in Baden-Württemberg – a state in Germany home to Porsche and Mercedes-Benz.
Using datasets from the US and Germany as well as its home data from the UK has improved the performance of the embodied AI system by three times, according to Wayve.
Though the company has global ambitions, Kendall made clear it would remain headquartered in Britain in a talk at London Tech Week.
The US already has a solid driverless vehicle market, with Google’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise already deploying automated taxis in parts of the country.
Founded in 2017, Wayve became the most valuable AI company in the UK last year, worth $3bn, after securing a $1.05bn investment from Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank and Uber.
Wayve dropped to second place in January after a $250m investment round valued voice cloning company ElevenLabs at $3.3bn.
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