Last year, frustrated by the pace of the industry, Urtasun left Uber, where she led the ride-hailing firm’s self-driving research for four years, to set up her own company, called Waabi. “Right now most approaches to self-driving are just too slow to make progress,” says Urtasun, who divides her time between the driverless-car industry and the University of Toronto. “We need a radically different one.”

Waabi has now revealed the controversial new shortcut to autonomous vehicles that Urtasun is betting on. The big idea? Ditch the cars.

For the last six months Waabi has been building a super-realistic virtual environment, called Waabi World. Instead of training an AI driver in real vehicles, Waabi plans to do it almost entirely inside the simulation. The plan is that the AI won’t be tested in real vehicles on real roads until a final round of fine-tuning.