# The British Founder Teaching Cars to Drive the Way People Do > Alex Kendall built Wayve on a contrarian bet, that a car should learn to drive the way a person does rather than follow a pre drawn map. Now, with a fortune raised and the government clearing the road, his machines are about to carry paying passengers through British cities. - Source: Morning Week - Canonical URL: https://morningweek.com/article/the-british-founder-teaching-cars-to-drive-the-way-people-do - Author: Morning Week Newsroom - Section: Tech - Published: 2026-08-13T14:22:33.253Z - Updated: 2026-08-13T14:22:33.253Z - Tags: Wayve, Alex Kendall, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, United Kingdom, Uber, autonomous vehicles, startups --- Most of the companies chasing the dream of the self-driving car have approached it like a mapping exercise. They send fleets of heavily instrumented vehicles to trace every kerb and traffic light of a city in painstaking detail, then let their cars follow that stored map like a train on invisible rails. Alex Kendall thinks this is the wrong way round. His company, Wayve, is built on the belief that a car should learn to drive the way a teenager does, by watching, practising and generalising, rather than by memorising a place it can never leave. That contrarian idea has carried Kendall a long way. Wayve began in 2017 as a Cambridge project, testing prototypes on quiet English roads, and has grown into the most valuable artificial intelligence company Britain has produced. Along the way Kendall, still in his early thirties, has become the face of a national ambition, the man most often named when politicians talk of Britain leading the driverless age rather than watching it arrive from Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. ## A GPT for driving The technical heart of Wayve is an approach its founder calls embodied artificial intelligence. Instead of writing millions of explicit rules for every situation a car might meet, the company trains a single large model on vast amounts of driving footage and lets it learn the underlying skill. The system takes in what its cameras see and decides directly how to steer, brake and accelerate, end to end, in much the way a language model turns a prompt into a sentence. Kendall likes to describe it as a kind of GPT for driving, a foundation model for moving through the physical world. The appeal of this method is flexibility. A car that has learned to drive rather than memorised a map is not confined to the handful of neighbourhoods its makers have surveyed. In principle it can be dropped into a city it has never seen and cope, reading a roundabout in Leeds or a rain slicked junction in London by drawing on everything it has learned elsewhere. That is a very different proposition from rivals whose robotaxis work beautifully but only within the invisible fences of their mapped zones. ## The money follows Investors have found the vision persuasive to a remarkable degree. Wayve raised more than a billion dollars in a single round led by SoftBank, with Nvidia and Microsoft joining in, a sum that ranked as the largest artificial intelligence funding round in European history and the biggest bet ever placed on a British AI firm. The backing values the company in the billions and, just as important, supplies the enormous computing power and data that its learning approach devours. In a field where progress is bought with scale, that war chest matters as much as any clever algorithm. The endorsement of those particular names carries a message of its own. Nvidia sells the chips on which such models run, Microsoft the cloud on which they are trained, and SoftBank has a long history of hunting for the company that will define a new category. Their collective wager is not merely on Wayve but on the idea that the winning approach to autonomy will look more like modern AI and less like the meticulous cartography that has dominated the industry so far. ## Britain clears the road What makes this a British story rather than simply a technological one is the role of the state. The government has decided to move faster than many expected, bringing forward pilots of small taxi and bus like services that carry passengers with no safety driver at the wheel, and which ordinary people will be able to summon through an app. The first of these are due in the spring, and Wayve has partnered with Uber to put fully autonomous vehicles onto London's streets, turning years of quiet testing into a public service that anyone can hail. The prize on offer helps explain the enthusiasm. Ministers point to projections that a thriving self-driving industry could add tens of billions of pounds to the economy and create tens of thousands of jobs over the coming decade. For a country anxious about its productivity and eager for a home grown technology champion, a company like Wayve is more than a business. It is a piece of industrial strategy, and Kendall has become an unlikely standard bearer for the idea that Britain can still build something the rest of the world will want. ## The road ahead None of this guarantees success. Teaching a machine to handle the endless strangeness of real traffic remains one of the hardest problems in computing, and a system that learns from experience can still be surprised by something it has never seen. A single serious accident can set an entire industry back by years, and public trust, once lost, is slow to rebuild. Kendall's approach may prove more adaptable than its rivals, or it may simply fail in less predictable ways. Yet the direction of travel is now clear. Within months, cars guided by nothing but a learned model and a set of cameras will be carrying paying passengers through British cities, and the man who insisted they should drive like people rather than follow maps will find out whether his bet was visionary or premature. For Britain, long a spectator in the great technology races of the age, it is a rare chance to be first. For Alex Kendall, it is the moment the theory meets the street. --- Originally published by Morning Week. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://morningweek.com/article/the-british-founder-teaching-cars-to-drive-the-way-people-do.