Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The five-way roundabout under the Oxford bypass near BMW’s Mini factory is a stiff test for any driver. But the self-driving Ford E-Transit passenger van in which I am riding navigates its way deftly through the weaving cars and trucks to accelerate away on the other side.It feels as if autonomous driving is a robotics exam that has been solved as we cruise around the city from which the van’s technology emerged. Then, as we reach a smaller and less complex roundabout, the screen by the driving wheel turns from blue to green and the van hands back control for 20 seconds to the safety driver.Our van has not recognised the roundabout on its sensors, including nine cameras and seven radars. The junction has yet to be added to its navigational map by Oxa, an Oxford university spinout that is one of the UK’s leading autonomous vehicle start-ups. So it calls for human support.This is a safe response but it shows the limits as well as the sophistication of Oxa’s AV technology. While self-driving taxis operated by US and Chinese companies including Waymo and Baidu are now carrying fare-paying passengers in cities such as San Francisco and Wuhan, there are no fully autonomous vehicles on British public roads.That is partly due to legal restrictions: the UK passed the Automated Vehicles Act last year but secondary legislation is needed to allow the testing of AVs without drivers by the target date of next year. There is also the question of money: Oxa has raised $225mn from investors and Wayve, a London-based AV start-up, has raised a total of $1.3bn, but rivals such as Alphabet’s Waymo have spent far more.The gradual advance of AV technology, which once promised to put fully self-driving cars on roads long ago, is forcing companies to make hard choices. Paul Newman, professor of robotics at Oxford and co-founder of Oxa, compares the field’s early promise to being “given extraordinary tools to climb a mountain and finding there is another one behind it”.Oxa once hoped to deploy AV shuttles in London by 2021 with Addison Lee, the taxi company. It now believes that fully self-driving cars and taxis, rather than those with driver assistance, will not be financially viable for more than a decade. “Waymo can charge $10 per ride in San Francisco because Alphabet [with other investors] has bankrolled it to the tune of $25bn,” says Gavin Jackson, Oxa CEO.Oxa’s response is to keep aiming for level 4 autonomy — AVs that drive themselves in limited, pre-mapped areas — but to narrow the target. It has started operating in the US with Beep, which runs shuttle buses in colleges and retirement communities, and hopes that logistics companies will soon use its AV software to carry baggage around airports and ports.Jackson says services that are “very uniform, where the vehicle does not deviate from a route” make the challenge simpler than the ultimate goal of full autonomy. This could include bus services or hub-to-hub truck routes, but industrial sites have the advantage of fewer people being there and goods not minding sudden stops.So Oxa is trying to license its software through vehicle makers and fleet operators. Focusing on industrial vehicles on repetitive routes restricts the potential market to about 250mn units globally, Jackson estimates, but there is a clear financial case for automation. “There are many vehicles in airports, a lot of people driving them, and a lot of people watching them.”Wayve, which was founded in 2017 in Cambridge, has picked another route to autonomy. The company uses AI to let cars drive by perception with cameras and radars, rather than relying on in-built maps. But while it ultimately aims for full self-driving, its medium-term strategy is to sell driver assistance software to carmakers, helping humans to navigate public roads.Neither UK contender is immediately chasing the original vision of software replacing drivers and steering wheels being removed from cars. That is probably wise: Tesla now wants to launch self-driving taxis in the US but “full self-driving mode” in its current cars still needs oversight. Some of the apparent technology gap amounts to rhetoric.The hope is that, as Newman puts it, “you could have a DeepSeek moment” and the UK’s “extraordinary intellectual ability” in the AV field will make up for it lacking the financial strength of China and the US. But while Jackson says the country can create an AV “super unicorn”, it needs a new road to get [email protected]
