Wayve signs production deal to put its AI Driver in Mercedes-Benz cars

Wayve signs production deal to put its AI Driver in Mercedes-Benz cars

22 September 2026: Wayve and Mercedes-Benz have signed a definitive production agreement to put the Wayve AI Driver in future Mercedes-Benz vehicles. Customers should have the system in their cars starting within the next two years, according to the announcement made in London.

What the system will do

The agreement covers urban and highway point-to-point driving assistance. The release describes assistance rather than a driverless car, so the person in the driver's seat stays responsible. Wayve says the AI Driver is designed to scale from advanced driver assistance to fully driverless products.

Mercedes-Benz integrated the system into its production system architecture using its own hardware, its operating system MB.OS and its map interfaces. The companies have demonstrated it in Stuttgart, London and San Francisco.

A step up from the technical partnership

The agreement follows a multi-year technical partnership and Mercedes-Benz's strategic investment in Wayve's Series D round earlier in 2026. Jörg Burzer, chief technology officer of Mercedes-Benz, said the partnership "marks 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 pace and depth of the joint development reflect "a deep technical alignment between our teams".

No maps, no fences

Wayve calls its method AV2.0. The software learns to drive without HD maps, which are costly to build and keep current, and the company says it is designed to generalise to new cities without geofences or city-specific retraining. A geofence is the digital boundary that keeps many driving systems inside a pre-surveyed area.

The software is trained on NVIDIA AI infrastructure hosted on Microsoft Azure.

Stellantis, the other production partner

Mercedes-Benz is not Wayve's only manufacturer partner. On 21 May Wayve and Stellantis announced a strategic technology partnership under which Stellantis plans to integrate the AI Driver into its STLA AutoDrive platform. The first product is hands-free, door-to-door supervised driving, rated Level 2++, on highways and in urban areas. The first vehicle integration is planned in North America in 2028. Kendall said teams brought up a prototype in less than two months.

On 9 October the two companies showed the system on a Fiat 500e and a Maserati Grecale at an event in Turin, with the two vehicles going from integration to road testing in under four weeks. They followed an earlier Jeep Grand Cherokee integration in 2026. Antonio Filosa, the Stellantis chief executive, and Kendall spoke at the event.

Robotaxis and leadership

On 17 June Stellantis, Wayve and Uber said they would explore Level 4 robotaxis on Stellantis L4-Ready platforms. The Wayve-Uber plan covers London, Tokyo and ten other cities, 12 in all. Wayve and Uber launched supervised rides in London on 3 September.

On 16 September Wayve appointed Elisa de Martel as chief financial officer. The company describes her as having more than two decades of financial leadership experience in deep tech, automotive and autonomous vehicle sectors. Wayve is registered as Wayve Technologies Ltd and has its headquarters at York Way in London.

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Sources

• Wayve: Wayve and Mercedes-Benz announce production agreement (London), 22 September 2026
• Wayve: Stellantis and Wayve partner to bring hands-free door-to-door supervised automated driving at scale, 21 May 2026
• Wayve: Stellantis and Wayve scale AI Driver, 9 October 2026
• Wayve press page (read 2026-10-17), 17 October 2026