In two years, Voyage has gone from a tiny self-driving car upstart spun out of Udacity to a company able to operate on 200 miles of roads in retirement communities.
Now, Voyage is on the verge of introducing a new vehicle that is critical to its mission of launching a truly driverless ride-hailing service. (Human safety drivers not included.)
This internal milestone, which Voyage CEO Oliver Cameron hinted at in a recent Medium post, went largely unnoticed. Voyage, after all, is just a 55-person speck of a startup in an industry, where the leading companies have amassed hundreds of engineers backed by war chests of $1 billion or more. Voyage has raised just $23.6 million from investors that include Khosla Ventures, CRV, Initialized Capital and the venture arm of Jaguar Land Rover.
Still, the die has yet to be cast in this burgeoning industry of autonomous vehicle technology. These are the middle-school years for autonomous vehicles — a time when size can be misinterpreted for maturity and change occurs in unpredictable bursts.
The upshot? It’s still unclear which companies will solve the technical and business puzzles of autonomous vehicles. There will be companies that successfully launch robotaxis and still fail to turn their service into a profitable commercial enterprise. And there will be operationally savvy companies that fail to develop and validate the technology to a point where human drivers can be removed.
Voyage wants to unlock both.
Crowded field
And it’s certainly not alone in its pursuit. Argo AI, Aptiv, Aurora, Cruise, Mobileye, Uber, Waymo and Zoox might be the most well-known AV companies in the field. But it’s a mere sliver of companies working on autonomous vehicle technology.
In California, where the bulk of testing occurs in the U.S., there are 63 companies that have received permits from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to test autonomous vehicles on public roads. That list includes automakers too, like BMW, Ford, GM, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla and VW — most of which have their own R&D departments while forming partnerships and investing in or acquiring pure-play AV companies.
In such a crowded pool of sharks, partnerships with the well-resourced and deep-pocketed titans of traditional automotive can help leaner startups with their manufacturing expertise.
Voyage is the latest AV startup to turn toward the automotive industry.
Voyage’s driverless vehicle
The company has partnered with an automaker to provide this next-generation vehicle designed specifically for autonomous driving, according to a source familiar with the deal, but not authorized to discuss it. Cameron wouldn’t comment on the partnership.
Few details are known about the collaboration, including the name of the manufacturer. The vehicle will be electric and it won’t be a retrofit like the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid vehicles Voyage currently uses or its first-generation vehicle, a Ford Fusion.
Most importantly, and a detail Cameron did share with TechCrunch, is that the vehicle it uses for its driverless service will have redundancies and safety-critical applications built into it.
“We need to prepare for the vehicle to fail,” Cameron told TechCrunch. “That means redundancy in every system, hardware and software.”
This driverless product — a term Cameron uses in a recent post on Medium — will initially be limited to 25 miles per hour, which is the driving speed within the two retirement communities in which Voyage currently tests and operates. The vehicle might operate at a low speed, but they are capable of handling complex traffic interactions, he wrote.
“With that tightly defined scope we will be generating revenue from passengers in truly driverless cars sooner than many think,” Cameron hinted in the post. “As the state-of-the-art advances, we will advance our self-driving technology with more capabilities, such as faster speeds, enabling driverless in progressively more complex communities. This is our strategy and strength.”
Voyage currently tests and provides rides (always with a human safety driver) in a 4,000-resident retirement community in San Jose, Calif., as well as The Villages, a 40-square-mile, 125,000-resident retirement city in Florida.
This new vehicle won’t immediately enable the company to roll out a driverless service. There’s still considerable work to be done, Cameron told TechCrunch. But it does remove the primary barrier to driverless operations.
Inching toward driverless
Cameron, who shies away from discussing timelines, describes the company as inching toward driverless service.
Its self-driving software has now reached maturation in the communities it is testing in, and Voyage is now focusing on validation, according to Cameron.
Voyage has developed a few systems that will help push it closer to a commercial driverless service while maintaining safety, such as a collision mitigation system that it calls Rango, an internal nickname inspired by the 2011 computer-animated Western action-comedy about a chameleon.
This collision mitigation system is designed to be extremely fast-reacting, like a reptile — hence the Rango name. Rango, which has an independent power source and compute system and uses a different approach to perception than the main self-driving system, is designed to react quickly. If needed, it will engage the full force of the brakes.
A ‘start small’ strategy
A truly driverless service is a goal that other companies such as Cruise, Mobileye, Uber and Waymo are chasing as well, and have yet to achieve. Even Waymo, a company largely considered at the front of the pack, is still using safety drivers for its Waymo One robotaxi service that operates in the suburbs of Phoenix. Waymo’s original and still operational early rider program does have some driverless rides, but the vast majority use safety drivers, according to the company.
Cameron argues that Voyage’s approach of starting with a niche, solvable problem has given the company an edge over its much bigger and better-funded competitors.
“At a high level, most self-driving companies seem to be trying to solve the world from Day 1 — complex environments, all speeds, everything,” Cameron told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “That’s kind of a bizarre approach. Advancements take time.”
He likens the approach to the same strategy that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Tesla have used.
It’s why, Cameron explains, Voyage started with retirement communities — places with specific customer demand and a simpler surrounding environment. Its aspirations lie far beyond its current operational design domain.
For now, the demographic that Voyage serves, which has an average age of 70, won’t change. But its reach will.
The plan, Cameron explained, is to master and validate the vehicles within its current domain and then launch a driverless service. The customers will stay the same for some time. But Voyage’s driverless service and reach will expand beyond the confines of The Villages and the retired, until there is no place they can’t reach.
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