France has set out an approval path for autonomous vehicles running to 2027, with Stellantis, Wayve, Bolt and G7 pitching pilot programmes. Wayve, Stellantis and Nvidia are working together on the underlying stack.
The dates are the interesting part. Stellantis and Wayve announced in May that they were targeting 2028 for hands-free, door-to-door supervised automated driving at scale. A regulatory approval path arriving in 2027 means the permission precedes the product by about a year, which is the reverse of the usual sequence in this industry and the reason the pilot pitches are happening now rather than later.
For the AI side specifically, Wayve's approach is end-to-end learned driving rather than hand-engineered rules, which is why Nvidia's involvement is on compute as much as on silicon in the car. A national approval route is the first thing that makes that approach commercially testable at scale rather than demonstrable.
Sources
The AI Insider · Stellantis