• While Waymo grabs headlines, BARO Vehicles is building the AI computers.
  • Drive-by-wire systems that others use to develop autonomous vehicles. Here's their story.

The AV Industry Has a Waymo Problem — and BARO Is the Alternative Thesis

Every mainstream story about autonomous vehicles is about the same companies: Waymo completing 150,000 driverless rides a week in San Francisco, Tesla rolling out Full Self-Driving to millions of cars, Cruise raising billions before a high-profile stumble. The narrative collapses the autonomous vehicle industry into a race between well-capitalised giants for the consumer robotaxi market.

BARO Vehicles is building something different — and arguably more durable. Rather than competing for the robotaxi prize, the UK-based startup is building the hardware and software infrastructure that allows others to develop autonomous systems: the AI computers, the drive-by-wire control systems, and the development platforms that Tier 2 automotive suppliers, university research teams, logistics operators, and startup mobility ventures need to build their own autonomous products.

It is an infrastructure play in a market that has mostly been covered as a consumer product race. Founded in 2015 by Carlos Escudero, Daniela González, Diego Rossi, and Gabriel Giani, BARO has spent nearly a decade building technical depth that most AV coverage has entirely overlooked.

The "Bridge Builder" Strategy

Most technology platform races eventually produce a layer of infrastructure companies that quietly power everyone else. BARO's stated mission is to build "the bridge to autonomous vehicles" — a deliberate positioning away from building the consumer product and toward enabling the supply chain.

The targets are specific: Tier 2 companies, automotive OEMs, and startup mobility ventures. These are organisations that want to develop autonomous or semi-autonomous systems but don't have the internal capacity to build every component from scratch. A logistics company testing autonomous port movers doesn't need to design its own drive-by-wire steering system. A university robotics lab doesn't need to build its own AI carrier board. BARO builds these components so developers can focus on the application layer rather than the hardware.

The company serves clients across multiple industries in three countries, and has exhibited at MOVE — London's major connected and autonomous mobility conference — positioning itself within the UK's emerging AV supply chain ecosystem.

The Technology Stack in Detail

BARO's product catalogue is narrow but technically specific — a sign of a company that has made genuine engineering choices rather than broadly claiming autonomous vehicle capability.

LITA Carrier Board is the company's AI computer, designed for sophisticated robotics applications. The board provides compatibility with Nvidia Jetson platforms and supplies peripherals for high-accuracy localisation, including an automotive-grade GPS with dead reckoning — an approach that maintains positioning accuracy even when satellite signals become intermittent.

The board integrates a 4G/5G modem slot for cloud connectivity, Bluetooth 5.0, and interfaces for four MIPI-CSI2 cameras — enabling 360-degree computer vision for object recognition — alongside a CAN Bus interface for communication with robot actuators. In an industry where autonomous systems fail in edge cases involving sensor dropout, the dead reckoning GPS is a particularly considered engineering decision.

Drive-by-Wire is BARO's electronic steering and control system — the component that replaces mechanical connection between steering wheel and wheels with computer-controlled actuation. The system runs an ARM Cortex M4F processor at 120 MHz, uses two encoders working in parallel for maximum accuracy on wheel position, and supports CAN-FD at up to 5 Mbits with cybersecurity encryption built into the data transfer layer.

The dual-encoder redundancy is safety-critical engineering: if one fails, the system continues operating on the second. The software compatibility with Arduino's development environment makes the system accessible to smaller development teams who lack specialist embedded systems engineers.

BARO CAV Platform is the development framework for building electric self-driving cars. The platform's electronics were standardised by ASM Technologies Limited under the automotive standard — a partnership that gives BARO's platform legitimate standing in automotive procurement conversations, where component traceability and standards compliance are non-negotiable requirements.

Government Validation: The DRIVEN BY SOUND Grant

The clearest external validation of BARO's technical credibility came in 2023, when the company was awarded a government-backed grant to address one of the hardest unsolved problems in autonomous vehicles: all-weather navigation.

In partnership with Calyo, BARO was awarded a £1.3 million grant to develop DRIVEN BY SOUND — an innovative safety module for automated vehicles. The project is part of the UK Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles' Commercialising CAM Supply Chain Competition, supported by Innovate UK and Zenzic. The project aims to deliver a navigation system designed to operate in all weather conditions, covering vehicle types from low-speed logistics to port movers and commercial vehicles.

The weather problem is the real bottleneck for autonomous vehicle deployment at scale. Fully autonomous vehicles are a reality in controlled conditions, but adverse weather remains a critical challenge — cameras fail in rain, LiDAR struggles in fog, and GPS becomes unreliable in dense urban environments. DRIVEN BY SOUND's approach, using 3D ultrasound sensors as a complementary modality, directly targets this gap.

The Vision: The First Car Without a Steering Wheel

BARO's long-term ambition goes beyond component supply. The company has stated its goal of developing what it describes as the first electric car without a steering wheel — a vehicle where the human-machine interface is entirely reimagined because mechanical steering is absent by design.

This is not a near-term product launch claim. It is a directional commitment to Level 5 full autonomy, where removing the steering wheel is only possible once the AI system is trusted to handle every driving scenario without exception. The steering wheel remains the most visible symbol of human oversight in autonomous systems — its removal is what full autonomy actually means in practice.

Bottom Line

BARO is a nine-person deep tech company doing serious engineering in a market dominated by companies with billions in capital. What distinguishes it is the infrastructure thesis: the AV race will eventually require a supply chain, and the companies building that supply chain can generate durable revenue regardless of which consumer AV platform wins.

With a £1.3 million government grant, partnerships with automotive standards bodies, and exhibition presence at major industry events, BARO has done what most early-stage deep tech companies struggle to do — establish technical credibility without a consumer product. The next milestone to watch is whether the DRIVEN BY SOUND safety module finds commercial traction with the European bus and logistics operators BARO has begun approaching.

Edited By Nabarun.