Stellantis picks UK’s Wayve to power 2028 hands-free driver-assist launch

TL;DR:

• Stellantis — the Franco-Italian-American carmaker behind Peugeot, Citroën, Fiat, Jeep and Chrysler — has signed a strategic partnership with London-based Wayve to integrate Wayve’s AI driving software into the STLA AutoDrive platform.
• First vehicle integration targets North America in 2028, with the system aimed at supervised “Level 2++” hands-free driving on highways and in cities; CEO Alex Kendall said Wayve’s AI Driver will be in a Stellantis vehicle prototype “in less than two months”.
• Wayve, founded in 2017 and backed by SoftBank and Nvidia, is also implementing assisted driving with Nissan (launch targeted Japan 2027) and developing robotaxis with Nissan and Uber, with a Tokyo pilot targeted by late 2026.

This is a commercial validation moment for the UK’s most prominent embodied-AI champion. Wayve has spent the last two years lining up automaker partnerships and platform deals; landing Stellantis — one of the world’s top three carmakers by volume — locks in a high-confidence customer that competes on cost and global scale rather than premium positioning. The Nissan deal landed Wayve in Japan; the Stellantis deal lands Wayve in volume-market North America.

The end-to-end AI bet is being tested at industrial scale

Wayve’s distinguishing technical bet is end-to-end AI driving software that does not rely on high-definition maps and is designed to generalise across geographies and vehicle types. That choice has always been the company’s hardest sell to legacy carmakers, who built their initial autonomy stacks around HD mapping and rule-based systems. A Stellantis-scale integration target — across multiple brands and platforms over time — is the strongest signal yet that the end-to-end approach is now considered industrially viable. For UK AV supply-chain firms (Oxbotica/Oxa, FiveAI, Conigital and a growing list of sensor and edge-compute SMEs), the partnership reframes the addressable market: Wayve is no longer just an R&D bet, it is a platform with paying customers.

The UK macro picture is also worth pricing in. UK Research and Innovation, the Department for Transport and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles have spent the last decade funding the British AV ecosystem; Wayve’s three current commercial deals (Stellantis, Nissan, Uber) are now the most concrete answer to “did the investment pay off?” that the sector has had to offer. The Automated Vehicles Act 2024 framework also gives UK SMEs a regulatory environment for piloting at home — a clearer runway than US patchwork regulation.

Looking forward

The 2028 Stellantis target is far enough out to matter strategically without being immediate revenue, but the Tokyo robotaxi pilot in late 2026 and Nissan Japan launch in 2027 will arrive sooner. For UK enterprise readers, the practical signal is that “British AI exports” is becoming concrete, with major commercial revenue lines, rather than a strategy slide. Expect the Department for Business and Trade to use the Stellantis announcement in trade-mission materials within weeks.