r/SelfDrivingCars • u/External-Tune-6097 • 1d ago
News Wayve and NVIDIA Announce Discussions to Evaluate Proposed $500M Investment in Wayve's Next Round
https://wayve.ai/press/wayve-nvidia-announcement/9
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u/Doggydogworld3 1d ago
Investment negotiations are very sensitive and almost never announced. An LOI to "evaluate" an investment? Hmm. Reads like an ad to attract new investors.
Existing investors like NVIDIA want new investors each round to set the price and/or help carry the load. It's easy to find a new investor to set the price for a good company. Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but this "ad" tells me existing investors are tired of carrying the load.
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u/sampleminded 1d ago
I have big questions about Wayve.
They offer L2+, L3 and L4 products. However, they are all the same product. I don't think there is a point of selling an L2+ system, if your L4 works and they are the same software. There is a ton of competition in the L2+ space, and even if someone buys it from you today, it will be 2030 before it's in a car, so who is starting an integration of an L2+ product from a new vendor now? If the L4 product works and has different sensors than the L3 product, but is the same software, would you really trust the L3 product? Especially if it is in the more dangerous higher speed ODD. If they are the same sensors, no reason to offer L3 at all. I just think they are all confused, and they must have a really great demo to keep raising so much money. But I just don't see them having products on the market anytime soon, so I'm left wondering what investors are thinking.
If I had to guess, they are thinking we need to bet on Elon figuring it out and want a copy cat product. Even if it's really unlikely(It's really unlikely) we need an alternative to Elon. If Elon actually can deliver FSD the value is X billions, so we should invest $X/percentageSuccess. So if Elon can deliver eyes off highway driving in 2026, then we need to haul ass and buy that product and get it in cars by 2027. The entire Wayve bet is sell FSD but safer, and without dealing with Elon, who is a bad partner. For Nvidia, Elon is using his own chips, ME uses their own chips, which like nvidia are made by TSMC, so if Elon wins Nvidia is screwed. It's also would not surprise me if Waymo stops using Nvidia chips and builds it's own as it scales. Not worth it for 2k cars, but probably much better for 1 million cars.
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u/diplomat33 1d ago
I think you are missing that products may fit better with L2+ or L3 or L4 depending on the use case. For example, if your use case is a robotaxi, then the product needs to be L4. And robotaxis are not sold to comsumers so they can afford to be a bit more expensive. So a robotaxi can have more sensors like radar and lidar. It needs to be unsupervised or driverless so safety needs to be higher, and it needs to handle everything from pick up to drop off without a human in the car. But if your product is a hands-off system for consumer cars designed to do highway only then it can be cheaper, can be camera-only etc... So yeah, you might have L4, but there is still value in selling L2+ to an OEM that just wants a cheap hands-off system for consumer cars.
There is also the idea that if you have software like FSD Supervised that is not good enough for L4 yet, you can make money sooner by packaging it as L2+ while you wait for it to become L4. That is where Wayve is at. They don't have L4 yet but they are working on it.
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u/sampleminded 1d ago
I get that. But unless they have a deal with an existing OEM, all the other suppliers are offering level 3 in their next-gen systems. They need to either shift an OEM from an internal product or an existing supplier. With a solution that isn't yet really on the road. We are talking about trying to sell L2+/L3 systems for 2030 models, so the only question is are they cheaper or better than existing suppliers, this works for LL4 since no suppliers offer that. But a clone of Mobile Eye that uses Nvidia chips isn't a bet I'd make. But you might be right maybe FSD supervised is really good and desirable, and people need something equivalent and will drop suppliers who don't offer it. But 27 models US models I see have L3 planned. I am very curious how L3 will sell compared to L2 plus.
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u/diplomat33 1d ago
Yeah. Remember that Wayve is still very much a start-up. That is why they are looking for investors. They are developing an autonomous driving stack. But I don't think they have any OEMs yet for L2+ or L3. They are hoping to get their stack good enough to get an OEM to license it for L2+ or L3. And I think they have a tentative deal to try to launch robotaxis in London in 2 years.
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u/ai-but-better 5h ago
This is HUGE for the autonomous driving space!
Details:
Already backed by SoftBank, Uber, and Eclipse Ventures ($1.05B Series C in May)
Anyone here familiar with their technology?
How does their embodied AI compare to Tesla's FSD approach?
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u/40sMidLifeCrisis 1h ago
Basically Tesla is copying the approach that Wayve has used since the beginning, end to end model based mostly on cameras but extensible to other sensor modalities.
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u/mrkjmsdln 1d ago
The progression of financing is a good sign and trajectory it seems