Self-driving car AI firm Wayve expands to Asia

Tokyo: British start up Wayve, which makes artificial intelligence systems for autonomous vehicles, expanded into Asia on Tuesday with a new testing a...

Tokyo: British start-up Wayve, which makes artificial intelligence systems for autonomous vehicles, expanded into Asia on Tuesday with a new testing and development centre in Japan.

Wayve last year said it had raised $1.05 billion led by Japan's SoftBank along with US titans Microsoft and Nvidia -- at the time the largest ever fundraising among European start-ups at the forefront of the AI field.

Traditional self-driving systems rely on pre-programmed maps.

But AI allows for "natural and human-like driving behaviour" that can "safely navigate around other road users", founder and CEO Alex Kendall told reporters.

Although fully driverless cars are still some way off, Wayve has started training its data models and testing them on the road -- under human supervision -- in London as well as the United States, Canada and Germany.