(1) Will these cars have a Voyage employee in them to supervise?
(2) What are your driver intervention rates, eg. compared to Waymo? [1]
(3) Is there anything unique about The Villages, FL that makes it easier (or harder) to deploy self driving cars?
Congrats and interested to see the responses!
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/01/13/waymos-...
1) Yes, at least today. We call them Operations Specialists, and they're highly trained in operating autonomous vehicles and customer service.
2) This is a tough one, since it's not apples-to-apples. That said, Waymo is clearly the industry leader in this regard, and we're glad that at least some of their formula is observable from the outside. We've been at this a little less than a year, and today many of our passenger rides are 95+% autonomous. A long way to go, though!
3) We love these communities for a number of reasons:
A) Speed limits in these communities tend to be a little more restricted than everyday public road. The faster you (and others) can go, the more complex it becomes. The roads are also spectacularly well-maintained.
B) Customer acquisition is a non-trivial problem, and with these sorts of partnerships we gain (exclusive) access to 125,000 potential riders. It would be brutal for us to achieve the same in San Francisco, and not necessarily cost effective to retain them.
C) If we wanted to try out concepts that may accelerate the timeframe to remove the Test Driver, a private community is easier to collaborate with.
D) Above all else, there's just a lot of demand for what we offer in these sorts of communities. Self-driving cars will lower the cost of transportation, and for those with vision impairments (or Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s etc.), it enables such residents to get around with less friction.
Do you mind if I ask what portion of your rides are ~100% autonomous? I feel like that's a more interesting metric for progress toward removing human operators.
>> (1) Will these cars have a Voyage employee in them to supervise?
>>>> 1) Yes, at least today. We call them Operations Specialists, and they're highly trained in operating autonomous vehicles and customer service.
My understanding of the autonomy levels (for what they're worth) is that while a human is behind the wheel, autonomy is not at level 4. If a human is required to take control in certain situations, it's either level 3 or 2.
Also according to this techrepublic article, while level 3 may still require a driver, a level 4 vehicle can still be limited to the "operational design domain". So human drivers can still be in place for extreme edge cases. Although I don't know the specifics of these vehicles, and don't think the "levels" of driving are very useful.
Edit, forgot link: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/autonomous-driving-leve...