Wayve and Uber began supervised autonomous rides in London

Wayve and Uber said on September 3 that they had started supervised autonomous rides in London, the first time autonomous trips have been available in the United Kingdom. Passengers requesting an UberX, Uber Electric or Uber Comfort in the city may be matched with a Wayve vehicle at no extra cost.

The companies were explicit that the service is supervised: a trained private hire driver licensed by Transport for London sits in the vehicle to oversee each trip. Wayve said it was starting with a small number of vehicles in this initial phase and would grow the fleet over time in line with rider demand, readiness and regulation.

The driving software is Wayve’s AI Driver, built on the approach the company calls AV2.0, in which an end-to-end model learns to drive from data rather than from hand-coded rules and predefined maps. Wayve describes the system as able to run on different vehicles and sensor sets rather than being tied to one hardware configuration.

Wayve also said the AI Driver would run on a Nissan LEAF using NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion, starting in Tokyo later this year.

The company, which is based in London, described the system in its announcement as British-built technology. Neither company gave a fleet size, a service area beyond the city, or a date for removing the safety driver. The London Assembly transport committee said on August 5 that the approval covered up to 15 vehicles on a trial basis for a year.