Mercedes-Benz will ship Wayve’s AI Driver in production cars within two years

The useful part

7:49 am PT 19 Comments Mercedes-Benz has signed a definitive production agreement with British self-driving startup Wayve to build its "AI Driver" into future Mercedes vehicles, with integration starting within the next two years. The company says its AI Driver runs without HD maps, geofences, or city-specific retraining, and can generalize to cities it hasn't seen before. That's the same "learned," end-to-end philosophy Tesla uses for Full Self-Driving, and the opposite of the heavily mapped, geofenced approach Waymo built its robotaxis on.

How it works

• "The pace and depth of our development work together reflect a deep technical alignment between our teams," said Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall.
• View all comments I think it's clear that other automakers will work with these ADAS/ADS system integrators rather than Tesla.
• Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow Electrek on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop.
• Wayve For this deal, Wayve integrated its AI Driver into Mercedes' own production system architecture: the automaker's hardware, its MB.OS operating system, and its map interfaces.
• The system was trained on Nvidia infrastructure running on Microsoft Azure.

What to take from it

Mercedes describes what customers will get as "advanced urban and highway point-to-point driving assistance." And notice what the announcement leaves out. Mercedes is now running three autonomy stacks Mercedes isn't betting on one self-driving system. It already sells Drive Pilot, its own hands-off, eyes-off Level 3 system for highway traffic jams.

Example or evidence

• So Mercedes is hedging: a rules-based L3 system for a narrow highway case, Nvidia's stack for L2+ point-to-point, and Wayve's embodied AI as a scalable path toward higher automation.
• It's the strategy of a company that wants autonomy, but it isn't sure which path will suceed yet.
• Wayve now counts Mercedes, Nissan, and Stellantis among the investors in its $1.5 billion Series D, which valued the company at $8.6 billion in February.
• Electrek's Take Top comment by Philip234 Liked by 3 people Note for file: there is about $600 B in Tesla share value predicated on the notion that it is significantly ahead and uniquely able monetize its...

Details worth keeping

It's the first time Wayve's end-to-end driving AI is going into a production car in the premium segment, and it deepens a relationship that already includes Mercedes investing in Wayve's $1.5 billion Series D round earlier this year. There's no SAE automation level, no named models, and no firmer date than "within the next two years." "This partnership marks the world's first integration of the Wayve AI Driver in the premium segment," said Jörg Burzer, Mercedes-Benz's chief technology officer. That was the first Level 3 system certified for US roads.

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