Mercedes-Benz signed a definitive production agreement with London-based Wayve on September 22, 2026, to integrate Wayve's AI Driver into future vehicles, with customer-facing deployment set to begin within two years4,5. The deal makes Mercedes the first premium automaker to adopt Wayve's end-to-end autonomous driving software and marks Wayve's third major production agreement in under nine months, following deals with Nissan and Stellantis2.
Mercedes chief technology officer Jörg Burzer called the partnership "the world's first integration of the Wayve AI Driver in the premium segment" and said the two companies are "laying the foundation to roll out this technology worldwide".
Technical integration already underway
The agreement builds on a multi-year technical partnership during which joint teams integrated the Wayve AI Driver into Mercedes' production system architecture, including Mercedes hardware, the MB.OS operating system, and map interfaces9. Demonstration drives have been completed in Stuttgart, London, and San Francisco across city streets, freeways, and country roads.
The customer-facing system is described as advanced urban and highway point-to-point driving assistance. Wayve's approach, which the company calls AV2.0, uses an embodied-AI system trained on driving data rather than hand-coded rules and high-definition maps. Wayve says the AI Driver operates without HD maps, geofences, or city-specific retraining and can generalize to cities it has not previously encountered. The underlying model was trained on Nvidia AI infrastructure hosted on Microsoft Azure.
Wayve licenses its AI Driver directly to automakers and provides tools to customize driving models for specific vehicles and brands. The company says the same architecture is designed to scale from advanced driver assistance through to fully driverless products, offering automakers a single system spanning consumer cars to robotaxis.
Wayve's expanding commercial footprint
The Mercedes deal deepens a financial relationship that began when Mercedes invested in Wayve's Series D funding round announced on February 25, 2026. That round raised $1.2 billion at a post-money valuation of $8.6 billion, led by Eclipse, Balderton, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from Microsoft, Nvidia, and Uber, as well as investments from Mercedes, Nissan, and Stellantis. Wayve said total capital secured reached $1.5 billion including additional milestone-based capital committed by Uber to scale Wayve-powered robotaxi deployments globally.
Wayve's commercialization timeline calls for commercial robotaxi trials with Uber beginning in 2026, with the first service planned for London and expansion to more than 10 markets globally. Consumer vehicles equipped with the AI Driver are expected from 2027, starting with L2+ hands-off capability under driver supervision. Wayve has begun offering supervised public rides in London.
Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall said "the pace and depth of the companies' development work together reflect deep technical alignment". The company recently hired former Waymo finance chief Elisa de Martel as its new CFO.
Mercedes already sells Drive Pilot, a hands-off, eyes-off Level 3 system for highway traffic jams that was the first Level 3 system certified for US roads. In January, Nvidia's open-source Alpamayo model shipped in the Mercedes CLA as a Level 2+ assistance system. Wayve is now the third AI driving partner alongside Nvidia and Momenta10.
ANALYSIS The layered supplier strategy positions Mercedes to draw on multiple AI driving stacks rather than depend on a single vendor, while Wayve's three OEM production deals in nine months validate a licensing model that contrasts with the vertically integrated approach of competitors that build and operate their own fleets.