UK autonomous driving startup Wayve has today announced a partnership with Uber to launch public-road trials of fully autonomous vehicles in London.
Uber said the partnership was its first major pilot in level 4 (L4) autonomous driving — where a vehicle can manage most driving situations without human intervention and doesn’t require a safety driver to be present.
Andrew MacDonald, president and chief operating officer of Uber, said in a statement the partnership with Wayve would push the company closer toward its vision “to make autonomy a safe and reliable option for riders everywhere.”
The UK government has championed self-driving technology. It’s aiming to have self-driving cars on the road by 2026 and says the development of the tech could create 38k jobs in the country, bringing £48bn to the economy.
London and other UK cities are a good testing ground for autonomous vehicles because of the complexity of road layouts and traffic laws compared to locations in the US — where so far most global L4 testing has been conducted.
This isn’t the first time Wayve and Uber have agreed to work together. In August 2024, the two companies announced a multi-year collaboration to integrate Wayve’s AI software into consumer vehicles on the Uber platform.
The plan to launch L4 public-road trials moves the partnership to the next phase, focusing on scaling up autonomous driving in European markets.
Founded in 2017, Wayve is building AI software and foundation models for autonomous driving. The startup is developing tech it hopes will allow AVs to learn while driving — instead of having to precisely map out every inch of road. Wayve began testing on public roads in the UK in 2018 and the US in 2024.
The company now has over 400 employees across the US, UK, Canada, Germany and Japan, following market launches in the latter two earlier this year.
The company shifted focus from developing fully autonomous vehicles a few years ago to developing self-driving features that can be built into cars, which it sees as revenue-generating more quickly.
Wayve has been ramping up commercialisation of its self-driving software in 2025, following a record $1bn raise, featuring SoftBank, Microsoft and Nvidia, last year.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/uber-and-wayve-to-launch-autonomous-vehicle-trials-in-the-uk/
