December 10, 2025 - Nissan Catches a Wayve

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for December 10, 2025, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry.  

Nissan has announced that it is the first automaker to partner with Wayve, a UK-based developer of software for assisted and automated driving systems. Wayve was one of the first companies to rely on an entirely artificial intelligence-based software stack. In addition to being AI-based, the Wayve system doesn't use any HD maps and doesn't rely on secondary rules-based safety algorithms. The company claims its training on multiple data sets from different regions of the world, including the UK, Germany, and the U.S., allows its system to be more generalizable. 

Nissan is planning to launch its next-generation ProPilot systems during fiscal year 2027, which runs from April 2027 to March 2028. The first-generation ProPilot debuted with hands-on lane centering and speed control in 2016, while the second-generation hands-off, eyes-on system debuted in Japan in 2019 and came to North America in 2023. Nissan hasn't provided much detail yet on what functionality will be enabled, but the new system is expected to supersede all of the existing variants and potentially add at least hands-off, eyes-off capability, which is also known as Level 3. 

According to the initial announcement of the partnership, ProPilot will use Nissan's Ground Truth Perception layer, which gets information from cameras, radar and lidar. It will also integrate the Wayve AI driver, which may include the prediction layer to determine what other road users are expected to do in the next several seconds and the motion planning layer to determine what the vehicle is going to do in response. Wayve has been testing its system in the UK, Europe and California, as well as in Japan more recently. 

Automakers are increasingly relying on a mix of software components developed in-house and elements sourced from suppliers like Wayve, Nvidia, or Bosch. 

Thanks for listening.