Wayve Debuts In America With Ford Mustang Mach-E Fleet

Following its somewhat surprising decision to shut down the commercial autonomous vehicle technology company Argo AI, Ford announced that it was pivoting away from Level 4 and 5 tech and toward more attainable Level 2 and 3 features. It also established a new entity to handle those endeavors – Latitude AI – and just this past summer, CEO Jim Farley announced that the company was pretty close to achieving Level 3 autonomy. In the meantime, there are a handful of third-party companies working toward full autonomy, and now, one of them – Wayve – has arrived in the U.S. with a fleet of Ford Mustang Mach-E crossovers.

Wayve- which is based out of London, England – just opened a new office in Silicon Valley in California, and will soon embark on a driver-assistance program in San Francisco and the Bay Area with its fleet of specially-outfitted Ford Mustang Mach-E models. This will mark the company’s first on-road trials outside of the UK as it works to develop AI software that can power driving assistance and automation features for vehicles in the future.

In the U.S., Wayve plans to focus on Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), which in turn will be used to expand its AI Driver product. Wayve’s Silicon Valley team will focus largely on software development, hardware integration, and deployment operations. Its AV2.0 approach replaces rule-based systems and geofenced routes with an end-to-end AI system that learns from data to drive any vehicle anywhere, rather than being limited to specific areas.

“Today marks a major milestone for Wayve. We are now testing our AI software in real-world environments across two continents,” said Alex Kendall, Co-founder and CEO of Wayve. “After years of pioneering a data-driven mapless AI Driver that can generalize across different vehicles and cities in the UK, we are excited to bring this technology to the US. San Francisco’s unique driving conditions offer rich data insights that will be crucial in further developing a global AI platform for automotive customers.”