Wayve introduces new approach to robotaxi race with Uber launch in London

London just got its first public robotaxi service, and it doesn’t come from the company you’d expect. Wayve, a UK-based AI startup valued at $8.6 billion, has launched supervised autonomous rides through the Uber app, putting it in direct competition with Waymo on its home turf before Waymo even arrives. The service went live around September 2-3, with an initial fleet of roughly 15 Ford Mustang Mach-E vehicles picking up passengers across London. A trained safety driver sits behind the wheel for every ride, but the car’s AI is doing the actual driving. A fundamentally different playbook What makes Wayve’s approach unusual in the autonomous vehicle world is what its cars don’t need. Most self-driving systems, including Waymo’s, rely heavily on high-definition maps that are painstakingly pre-built for every street, intersection, and curb. Wayve’s AV2.0 system skips all of that. Instead of memorizing routes, the AI uses what the company calls experience-based learning. It processes camera and sensor data in real time, making driving decisions by understanding the scene in front of it rather than cross-referencing a digital blueprint. It also means no geofencing, those invisible bound...