May Mobility is trying to solve self-driving — one shuttle at a time
"Microtransit" may be the solution for developing self-driving and autonomous tech.
For years, there's been hype about autonomous vehicles. McKinsey forecasts the global autonomous vehicle market will reach $614 billion by 2030 alone, and many of the biggest names in autos and tech have already splashed out to get ahead of the curve.
Autonomous trials are underway in cities across the US, with GM’s driverless unit Cruise operating in 15 locations across the US, as well as in Dubai and Japan, and Google’s Waymo running two ongoing trials in America.
It's been a long road to get here, with increasing levels of autonomy. But hiccups like Ford and VW-backed Argo AI getting shut down, and other well-funded startups downsizing, show that solving the autonomy conundrum remains elusive.
Some believe technology leaps — such as what’s happening with AI — will solve problems of autonomy, with companies like Nvidia pumping out cutting-edge chips for faster processing of AI tasks. Or look at Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer, which aims to train Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) raw processing power to learn and iterate much faster than previous systems.
A few startups are making waves in the space too. May Mobility, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based autonomous ridesharing transit company, operates self-driving shuttles in locations including Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids, Mich., and even Hiroshima, Japan.
“We sell long-term transportation contracts to businesses and governments, and what this allows us to do is to create a gentle onramp for the technology,” May Mobility CEO Edwin Olson said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “So we don't have to solve every driving problem on day one, but we can grow our technology bit by bit.”
May Mobility’s offering is “microtransit” services for municipalities, with shuttles that can handle five riders at a time. The company is using strategic partner Toyota’s Sienna Autono-MaaS minivans, which are essentially autonomous platforms that can use May Mobility’s software and sensor setups.
May Mobility uses its own self-driving technology, which is based on the company’s multi-policy decision-making (MPDM) software. The company says its MPDM software can think like a human, by observing “its surroundings and all the possible variables and then [waiting] as long as possible before committing to a specific action,” even in a situation it's never encountered before.
May Mobility believes the way to solve the autonomous puzzle is by starting small, and going where services are most acutely needed — at the local level, and even suburban areas. For example, May Mobility is helping senior citizens in Sun City, Ariz., get around town.
Cities and communities are also where the company sees itself making money. Olson says May Mobility wants to start in municipalities that have bus systems that are underperforming or where public transit systems are not optimized.
“We're really focused on building the business part of autonomous vehicles, not just building research and development prototypes,” Olson said. “We believe that the first markets will be the ones where the unit economics are the strongest. Those tend to be in municipal and business deployments, where the revenues can be quite high, but you can also control a lot of the costs that would otherwise accrue to the vehicle.”
Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
Click here for the latest stock market news and in-depth analysis, including events that move stocks
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance