Wayve is a London company that builds the Wayve AI Driver, self-driving software it licenses to carmakers and to Uber instead of running its own taxi service. Since September 3, 2026, Uber riders in London can be matched with a Wayve car, with a licensed safety driver on board. Nissan, Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis have agreed to put the same software in future consumer cars as a driver-assistance system, with Wayve saying those cars start arriving from 2027.
How Wayve’s approach differs
Wayve calls its approach AV2.0. Instead of programming rules on top of detailed high-definition maps of each city, it trains one large neural network to go from camera and sensor input to driving decisions, the way a person learns by experience. Wayve says this lets the same AI Driver work in new cities without HD maps, geofences or city-specific retraining (Wayve, September 22, 2026).
The practical consequence is the business model. Waymo and Zoox build and run their own fleets city by city. Wayve sells one piece of software that is meant to run in many different car models, from driver assistance in a privately owned car to a driverless robotaxi. That claim of easy generalization is Wayve’s; the London service is the first public test of it with paying riders.
How to ride a Wayve car in London
According to the Wayve and Uber launch announcement:
- Request an UberX, Uber Electric or Uber Comfort in London. Uber may match you with a Wayve car at no extra cost; the fare is the upfront price shown in the app.
- To raise your chances of a match, opt in under Settings, then Trip Preferences, in the Uber app. You can’t book a Wayve car directly.
- Before the car arrives, you can accept the Wayve ride or switch to a regular ride.
- When the car arrives, unlock the doors and start the trip from your Uber app. A screen inside, available in 64 languages, shows the planned route.
The cars are all-electric Ford Mustang Mach-E vehicles with the Wayve AI Driver and surround sensors. At launch you could travel anywhere in London except airports. Every ride is supervised: a trained, TfL-licensed private hire driver sits on board to oversee the trip. Uber and Wayve said they started with a small number of vehicles, and more than 140,000 Londoners had opted in by launch day, so a match is not guaranteed.
Which carmakers use Wayve
- Nissan: Wayve signed a production agreement with Nissan in 2025 to bring the AI Driver into Nissan’s next-generation ProPILOT driver assistance. Wayve’s Series D announcement says supervised autonomy software reaches consumer vehicles from 2027. Wayve, Nissan and Uber also signed a memorandum in 2026 for a robotaxi pilot in Tokyo, subject to regulatory discussions.
- Mercedes-Benz: a definitive production agreement signed September 22, 2026, to add urban and highway point-to-point driving assistance to future Mercedes-Benz vehicles “starting in the next two years,” running on Mercedes hardware and the MB.OS operating system.
- Stellantis: a technology partnership. On October 9, 2026, the two companies showed the AI Driver running in Fiat 500e and Maserati Grecale development vehicles (Wayve press release). No production model or date was announced.
In the consumer cars, the AI Driver works as supervised driver assistance. You keep responsibility for driving, much like with today’s hands-off highway systems, so these cars won’t be self-driving in the robotaxi sense. Our explainer on SAE driving levels (in Korean) explains where that responsibility line falls.
Funding and backers
Wayve closed a $1.2 billion Series D in February 2026 at an $8.6 billion post-money valuation, with Microsoft, NVIDIA and Uber joining Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis as investors. Uber committed additional milestone-based capital tied to robotaxi deployments, bringing the total to $1.5 billion (Wayve). Uber and Wayve have said they plan to deploy together in more than 10 markets.
What is still to come
- Driverless rides in London with no safety driver. The current service is supervised, and Wayve and Uber haven’t given a date for removing the driver.
- The Tokyo robotaxi pilot with Nissan and Uber, planned for late 2026 subject to regulators.
- The first Nissan and Mercedes-Benz production cars with the AI Driver, expected from 2027.
For other robotaxi services you can use today, see our guides to Waymo fares and cities, Pony.ai robotaxis and the Nuro, Uber and Lucid robotaxi, which is Uber’s other big autonomous partnership.