Alex Kendall and Amar Shah, Wayve’s co-founders, believe that their machine learning technology will prove more easily adaptable than options being pursued by Elon Musk and othersFIONA HANSON

Where are all the self-driving cars? Elon Musk, whose electric car company is a leader in the field, declared back in 2015 that “we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years”. That deadline has been comfortably missed but the Tesla founder was far from alone in underestimating the scale of the autonomy challenge.

Daimler’s chief executive, Ola Källenius, has said that ensuring self-driving cars can be safe in crowded cities is proving much harder than engineers anticipated. Shigeki Tomoyama, of Toyota, said last month that investors and manufacturers were “revising their timeline for artificial intelligence deployment significantly”, while Nissan has abandoned a target to develop cars that can drive themselves on city streets by 2020.

Yet Mr Musk remains bullish, having recently promised “fully…