In 2004, 15 driverless cars set off on a 150-mile trek across the Mojave desert, competing to win a $1m bounty set by DARPA, the research arm of America’s Department of Defence. Not a single car made it. Even the best-performing team managed only eight miles before their system broke down. Yet the “Grand Challenge”, as the race is known, is widely cited as a turning point for autonomous vehicles, kick-starting a research programme that took them out of science fiction and onto the streets.

Even so, as recently as five years ago it was easy to question whether the firms developing driverless cars would ever solve the myriad problems preventing them from being safely operated. Now they are increasingly common around the world, operated by tech giants like Waymo, Tesla and Baidu in cities including San Francisco, Austin and Beijing. The only question remaining is how long it will take before the majority of cars on the road are autonomous. My guest on this week’s episode of Inside Tech is one of the people hoping to speed up that transition: Alex Kendall, the boss of the British startup Wayve.

Born out of Mr Kendall’s robotics experience at the University of Cambridge, Wayve has always done things slightly differently to its big American competitors. Where they prioritised high-definition maps and rules-based driving, Wayve switched early to an entirely neural-network-based approach. Rather than building expensive sensor rigs with powerful computers, the company has tried to build systems that can be installed inside existing mass-produced cars. And as well as working with Uber on rolling out a fleet of robotaxis, Wayve is now partnering with established car-makers to sell self-driving vehicles to people who still want to own a car in the future.

I wanted to speak to Mr Kendall to get a sense of why he thinks his approach will work. It’s bold to go head-to-head with Google and Tesla, and even more so to do it from an industrial estate in North London rather than a glossy campus in Silicon Valley.

The bosses of the leading AI companies love to talk about changing the world. Even if they don’t succeed in building a machine God, they’re certainly on track to radically reshape the nature of employment. But much of the impact of even OpenAI’s work will for the moment be limited to pixels on a screen.

Cars, by contrast, define our built environment. They shape our cities and, for many people, our lives. Changing how they work will have an enormous visible impact almost immediately.

It certainly will for me. I grew up in London, and have never bothered to learn to drive. The first time I was ever alone in a moving vehicle was last year, on a trip to San Francisco, when I took my first Waymo. I can’t say the experience was thrilling—checking emails while stuck in traffic felt much the same—but I hope Mr Kendall and his peers succeed in making it a more frequent occurrence for me and everyone else. Join me tomorrow to hear about how he intends to do just that and, once you’ve watched our discussion, write to insider@economist.com with your thoughts. See you in the future!