Investors have sunk more than $100 billion into building cars that can drive by themselves. That's a third of what NASA spent getting humans to the moon. Yet despite a decade and a half of development and untold miles of road testing, driverless tech is stuck in the pilot phase. "We are seeing extraordinary amounts of spending to get very limited results," says Kendall. That's why Wayve and other autonomous-vehicle startups like Waabi and Ghost, both in the US, and Autobrains, based in Israel, are going all in on AI. Branding themselves AV2.0, they're betting that smarter, cheaper tech will let them overtake current market leaders.