GoKawiilRaquel Urtasun has spent 16 years in the self-driving space, long enough to navigate every metaphorical glorious hill and plunging valley. She took the trip from the early “pipe dream” dismissals, to the “we’re this close” certainty, and back again.
The industry is now riding a new wave of optimism and investment, including at Waabi Innovation Inc., the autonomous trucking company that Urtasun founded in 2021. The Spanish-Canadian professor at the University of Toronto, and former chief scientist of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, has helped make Waabi a key player. Beginning in fall 2023, theToronto-based startup has been running geofenced cargo routes from Dallas to Houston in a fleet of retrofitted Peterbilt semis, navigating even residential streets in loaded, 36,000-kilogram (80,000-pound) behemoths with a human “safety observer” on board.
In October, the company reached a milestone by integrating its “Waabi Driver” physical-AI system in Volvo’s new VNL Autonomous truck, which the Swedish automaker is building in Virginia. That self-driving solution uses Nvidia’s Drive AGX Thor, an AI-based platform for autonomous and software-defined vehicles.
In January, the Toronto-based startup raised $750 million in its latest funding round to accelerate commercial development in autonomous trucking, and expand its system into the fiercely competitive robotaxi space. Backers include Khosla Ventures, Nvidia, and Volvo.
Urtasun says the Waabi Driver can scale across a full range of vehicles, geographies and environments—although snowstorms can still create a no-go zone for now. It’s powered by what Urtasun calls the industry’s most advanced neural simulator. The verifiable, end-to-end AI model will be a “shared brain” that partners can transplant into cars, trucks, and pretty much anything on wheels. The idea is to grab a chunk of a global autonomous trucking business that McKinsey estimates could be worth more than $600 billion a year by 2035; with autonomous haulers responsible for 15 percent of total U.S. trucking miles as early as 2030.
Backed by an additional $250 million from Uber, Waabi plans to deploy at least 25,000 autonomous taxis through Uber’s ride-hailing service, whose world-dominating reach encompasses 70 countries, about 15,000 cities and more than 200 million monthly users.
Urtasun spoke with IEEE Spectrum about how Waabi is counting on sensors and simulation to prove real-world safety; and why the move to autonomy is a moral imperative that outweighs the disruption for human drivers—whether they’re driving trucks or family sedans. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
The Shift to Next-Gen Autonomous Vehicles
IEEE Spectrum: Until quite recently, autonomous tech seemed to have hit a wall, at least in the public’s mind. Now investors are flooding the zone again, and companies are all-in. What happened?
Raquel Urtasun: There were a lot of empty promises, or [people] not realizing the complexity of the problem. There was a realization that actually, this problem is harder than people anticipated. It’s also because of the type of technology that was developed at the time, what we call “AV 1.0”. These are hand-engineered systems that need to be brute-forced by humans. You need lots of capital and a massive amount of miles on the road just to get to the first deployment.
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