Alex Kendall, 33, developed a new approach to autonomous driving that has the potential to rapidly increase its adoption. His method uses AI to teach cars how to drive starting from no previous knowledge or hard-coded rules. Once trained, cars using his technology can navigate roads they’ve never encountered before—just like a person can.
“Eight years ago, when I started the company, the autonomous driving industry was on a totally different tack,” says Kendall, who cofounded his startup Wayve in Cambridge, UK in 2017. Back then, self-driving systems required multiple neural networks, trained individually and then manually coded together. There were separate networks for observing the environment, making decisions, and controlling the vehicle. These systems relied heavily on up-to-date, high-definition maps, and pre-training for every road where they would eventually operate.
Wayve’s approach starts at zero. It takes in raw data directly from cameras and other onboard sensors in a fleet of cars driven by humans, sends it through a deep learning model, and figures out the rules of the road and how to operate a given vehicle on its own. As a result, Kendall says, Wayve can scale to new cars, new environments, and new hardware quickly.
For example, when Kendall’s team extended their testing from the UK to the US, vehicles using Wayve’s technology learned how to drive equally well on the opposite side of the road with just 500 additional hours of training.
Unlike Tesla, Wayve licenses its technology to other car companies and is able to run on different hardware platforms, using cameras, lidar, or other combinations of sensors. Because Wayve takes a generalized approach, Kendall says, its fundamental technology could be adapted for other purposes, including controlling robots in smart manufacturing plants or operating airplanes and drones.
Other companies seem to have taken notice. While Waymo still uses an old-school approach, Tesla switched to a Wayve-like, end-to-end learning model in 2023. And Wayve, which has already declared around $1.3 billion in investment, announced its first commercial partnership: Nissan will use Wayve’s technology for driver-assistance systems starting in 2027.
