Every auto executive across the world must know now that their in a race to offer true door-to-door self-driving capability. While Elon Musk hyped up Tesla robotaxis a decade ago and expected to be a decade ahead of everyone with such capability, what we’re seeing is various automakers and self-driving technology companies getting better and better at driver-assist technologies and getting closer and closer to true self-driving. Eventually, it’s going to be expected that one’s car can drive a person to where they want to go. They won’t be waiting on a robotaxi to come pick them up; their own car in their garage will be their chaffeur. Of course, there’s plenty of debate about how far away we are from this, but BYD has basically started to offer it, and there are many Tesla FSD users who have to pay attention all the time (at least legally) but who are letting their cars driving them 99% of the time. With this in mind, every automaker needs to be adding capability ASAP. The latest news on this front is Stellantis partnering with Wayve in order to offer hands-free, door-to-door, supervised automated driving. The press release calls this “Level 2++” — quite a funny/odd distinction. Well, the announcement came last month, but the capability is not coming until … 2028. Better late than never. “Service is targeted to launch in 2028, starting in North America, built on an AI architecture designed to scale efficiently across vehicle platforms and markets over time,” Stellantis writes. That sounds interesting, but we’re still far away from 2028, so who knows if they achieve that dream or not? The partnership involves integrating Wayve AI technology with Stellantis’ STLA AutoDrive platform. Staying true to the company’s laggardly approach to the EV transition, Stellantis is highlighting this news with a picture of a non-electric Jeep that is supposed to be equipped with the Wayve tech. “The agreement builds on Stellantis’ recent strategic investment in Wayve and marks the next phase of collaboration between the companies, combining Wayve’s end to end AI driving intelligence with Stellantis’ advanced STLA AutoDrive platform, engineering expertise, and manufacturing scale,” the news release states. “The initial focus of the partnership is hands-free, door-to-door supervised automated driving (Level 2++), supporting both highway and urban driving scenarios. STLA AutoDrive platform is designed to support the evolution toward more advanced automated driving features, in line with regulatory readiness and customer expectations.” It’ll be interesting to see where the market is on this kind of thing when Stellantis brings it out in 2028, assuming all the key assumptions and plans come true. We have covered Wayve a handful of times, including when it launched the first self-driving vehicles on the streets of the UK. Nissan and Wayve also partnered up recently in a similar way that Stellantis and Wayve are doing so. Even more recently, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Uber, and Mercedes partnered up. “UK autonomous driving startup Wayve just added about $1.5 billion to its investment stack as it works toward full autonomy,” Steve Hanley summarized three months ago. However far along it is, Wayve keeps convincing large companies that it’s on the right track.
