Credit: Wayve Wayve has signed a definitive production agreement with Mercedes-Benz to put its AI Driver into future vehicles within the next two years, providing urban and motorway point-to-point driving assistance. Mercedes invested in Wayve’s $1.5B Series D in February, and the software has been integrated into its production architecture using MB.OS. Wayve has signed a production agreement with Mercedes-Benz to put its AI Driver into future Mercedes cars within the next two years, the London company said. It will provide urban and motorway point-to-point driving assistance.
That is British software in a German car. Wayve opened a hub near Stuttgart in March 2025, saying at the time that it wanted to partner with German manufacturers and tier one suppliers. It now has one. The teams integrated the software into Mercedes production architecture, using its hardware, its MB.OS operating system and its map interfaces.
The word doing the work is assistance. Both companies describe point-to-point driving assistance rather than autonomy, which means the person in the seat remains responsible. Chief technology officer Jorg Burzer called it the world’s first integration of the Wayve AI Driver in the premium segment. Alex Kendall, Wayve’s co-founder and chief executive, said the work reflected a deep technical alignment between the two teams.
Mercedes already sells something stronger than that. Drive Pilot holds the first internationally valid approval for conditionally automated driving, and Germany’s federal motor transport authority cleared it to 95 km/h in December 2024. The driver may turn their attention elsewhere, in the right-hand motorway lane, behind a lead vehicle, above 4 degrees Celsius. So a buyer gets two different promises.
One lets you stop watching the road on a motorway. The other drives you across a city while you keep watching it. Mercedes put money into Wayve’s $1.5B Series D in February at an $8.6B valuation, alongside Nissan and Stellantis. Wayve says the system travels.
Its AI Driver learns without HD maps and trains on Nvidia infrastructure hosted on Microsoft Azure, which the company says lets it generalise to new cities without geofences or local retraining. It demonstrated the Mercedes integration in Stuttgart, London and San Francisco. The same system is designed to run from assistance up to driverless products across a carmaker’s line-up. London is where that claim meets a regulator.
Wayve and Uber run fewer than 20 Ford Mustang Mach-Es there, licensed as private hire vehicles with a paid driver legally responsible for every journey. That is because nobody has finished the permit scheme Britain opened in May. A production deal reaches customers first.
Leave a Reply