As I arrive, he's making an impressive delivery of salad and big blocks of carved ham and good cheese for lunch. Already catering to 385 people in London alone, and now around 450 employees in total, including the new US headquarters and test base Vevey recently opened in Sunnyvale, California: it's the first of SoftBank's cash. There is public use. It may have been under the radar until its headline-making funding round in May, but this start-up started in 2017, and like most overnight successes it took a long time to build.
That investment was seen as a clear sign that self-driving cars are on the rise.trough of disillusionmentThis is very common in technology when promotion has to be translated into application. Some of the largest and best-funded companies admitted that autonomy was the hardest problem they were working on. In some cases very difficult: in many other cases, AppleUber and Volkswagen have abandoned AV programs in recent years.
But there is a new optimism about autonomy. In addition to the Wave deal, Alphabet's waymo It is now offering 150,000 driverless rides per week in San Francisco, LA and Phoenix, and has announced expansion into Austin and Atlanta starting early next year. Autonomous Trucking Service Arora Will soon make its first driverless trips in Texas. Tesla finally showed cybercabEven though its half-hour launch event was disappointingly light on details. Met Rimac's autonomous ride-hailing service VerneWhich uses beautiful, exclusive two-seat coupes without steering wheels or pedals, will launch in Zagreb next year, with at least a dozen other cities already signed up.
Wave may have nothing like Waymo's scale, budget or miles driven. But there's also Alex Kendall, who already has—ELON A combination of messianic vision, inspiration and the ability to solve problems on your own. And Weway takes a fundamentally different, completely AI approach to autonomy than Waymo, which could allow it to grow far faster and roll out more widely than its rivals.
“In 2017, when we started Wave, we were at the peak hype cycle for autonomous cars,” Kendall told me. “Everyone was saying, 'Oh, it's a year away, and it's going to be magical.' The dream. He thought of self-driving as an infrastructure and a hand-coded robotics problem.