I’m counting hazards. A cyclist is flying off the pavement into the road, a bus is moving off without indicating and a couple of pedestrians are wandering into the street without looking. If I were behind the wheel, I’d be swearing like a sailor by now.
Happily, I’m not behind the wheel: no one is.
I’ve been invited to the headquarters of Wayve, Britain’s first autonomous vehicle (AV) company, in north London. Nearly a decade after the company was founded, in 2017, I’m among the first people in the UK to be taken for a spin in one of its robotic taxis, which are soon expected to launch on the streets of Britain’s capital.
Despite being viewed by many as “the future”, autonomous cars are actually old hat by now. Uber, Wayve’s partner for the UK launch, started experimenting with autonomous vehicles about a decade ago, and such cars are now a common sight around San Francisco, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Dallas and Austin.
The streets of London, however, represent different challenges for driverless cars. As I noted when I visited Austin to see Uber’s AV rollout last year, American cities are characterised by wide, straight roads, with minimal on-street parking and largely clear of public transport.
Unique challenges
By contrast, a city like London is a minefield. The streets are narrow and winding, clogged with buses and cyclists, while our lax attitude to what Americans call “jaywalking” means drivers must be constantly vigilant. It’s a testament to the skill of British drivers that we forget how chaotic our roads can be.
All of that had to be built into Wayve’s artificial intelligence, which has been trained on “millions of examples of good driving”, according to Victor Charoonsophonsak, the head of technical operations at Wayve.
“London is one of the most complex driving environments in the world,” Charoonsophonsak says. “That’s one of the main reasons we chose to launch and develop this technology here. If we can drive in London, we can drive anywhere in the world.”
Wayve’s technology differs slightly from the AV cars Uber is already operating in the US, which were created by the Google sister company Waymo, in that there are fewer radars and sensors on the car. The information the car reacts to comes from cameras, which are cheaper and easier to install and can be retrofitted to a greater variety of vehicles. In London, Wayve’s fleet consists of the all-electric Ford Mustang Mach E, but the company plans to launch in Tokyo with Nissan Leaf EVs.
Instant impact