UK driverless car system ‘safer than Tesla’s’
THE founder of the driverless car company that last week became Britain’s best-funded AI start-up has said his system will be safer than Tesla’s self-driving software.
Wayve’s chief executive, Alex Kendall, added that it would be a “safer, more performant product” than those developed by individual carmakers because it would be trained using a wider range of vehicles.
Tesla, run by Elon Musk, is facing scrutiny by US regulators and lawsuits over its driver-assistance systems, Autopilot and Full Self-driving (FSD).
Wayve last week raised £800m in a record funding round for a European AI start-up. It is a potential direct challenger to Tesla in the race to develop driverless cars because the companies use similar “deep learning” AI techniques to develop their systems and rely largely on cameras rather than expensive sensing components.
However, Mr Kendall said Wayve was in discussions with multiple car companies to install its software in their vehicles, which in turn would provide masses of data to improve its software.
Tesla sold 1.8m cars last year, slightly less than 2pc of the market and Mr Kendall observed: “A car company that is shipping 1m to 2m cars a year, that’s 1pc of the car market” , without mentioning
Tesla by name. “The market coverage, the diversity of data and experience you can get working with the other 99pc … a much more performant and [safer] system should result from an AI trained on that data as opposed to a single car company.
“[It will] provide market-leading levels of safety, beyond what any automotive manufacturer can do on their own.”
Wayve, which has been testing its driverless systems in London, raised funds last week from Softbank, the Japanese giant, Microsoft and Nvidia.
The company is in discussions with carmakers about putting a less advanced driver-assistance system in vehicles and upgrading it over time to a more advanced version that handles the vast majority of driving tasks.
Mr Musk said last month that Tesla was talking to a “major automaker” about licensing its FSD system.