
Autonomous transportation launching to 125k residents in Florida - olivercameron
https://news.voyage.auto/self-driving-cars-in-a-city-like-no-other-c9b38807a9a6
======
olivercameron
Hello everyone! Oliver, the CEO of Voyage and YC alum (2011) here.

I got started in the self-driving car world as a member of the team that built
Udacity's self-driving car curriculum, and also an open source self-driving
car. This industry is crazy fun and moving ridiculously fast.

Let me know if I can answer any questions at all about absolutely anything.

We're really excited about bringing Level-4 transportation to the world, but
especially so at places like The Villages, Florida. Whether it’s helping those
with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, vision impairment, or just those who want to
get around with less friction, we’ve seen first-hand the positive impact
autonomous transportation can have for seniors.

~~~
marcell
Hi Oliver, a few questions:

(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-...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/01/13/waymos-
self-driving-cars-need-less-driver-intervention/96529888/)

~~~
olivercameron
Hi marcell, great questions.

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.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Hi Oliver. Good luck with this great project.

>> (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.

~~~
WonkeyMonkey
I have a feeling human operators are there for more customer service purposes.
Given the location selected it might be wise to have staff on hand. The idea
of no humans makes me think of the news story recently on the front page here
about the hitchhiking robot being destroyed also seems relevant, although
private areas may be less prone to incident like this.
([https://www.wired.co.uk/article/hitchbot-usa-vandalised-
phil...](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/hitchbot-usa-vandalised-
philadelphia))

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...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/autonomous-driving-
levels-0-to-5-understanding-the-differences/)

------
Animats
This was what Google was thinking for their little 25MPH bubble car. The one
they discontinued in 2016.[1] The great thing about a 25MPH speed limit is
that slamming on the brakes deals with most problems. You don't have a
stopping distance long enough that you have to steer out of them.

Good idea, still too expensive per unit. Votage has a huge upfront cost spread
over very few cars. Plus human drivers, which means "it doesn't really work
yet". This is a "can we get market share before the money runs out" play. It
worked for Uber. Things like this will be in retirement communities everywhere
around 2025, once the sensors are in volume manufacture and cheap.

When I was working on self-driving (2005 Grand Challenge) I saw two initial
use cases - this one, and airport rental car pick-up and return. Both require
only slow-speed driving in reasonably controlled environments, something which
can be made to work. Neither is yet economically feasible.

[1] [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603126/google-puts-the-
br...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603126/google-puts-the-brakes-on-
its-autonomous-bubble-car/)

~~~
akira2501
> The great thing about a 25MPH speed limit is that slamming on the brakes
> deals with most problems.

Might still not be that great if your clients are elderly.

~~~
dx034
On suburban roads, nearly all obstacles will be seen early enough to allow for
slow breaking. It's very different in cities where people can appear between
parked cars.

~~~
akira2501
I meant as passengers. Restraint systems are designed with healthy bodies in
mind, and they wreak havoc on the elderly. "Slamming the breaks" is not a
valid strategy in this environment.

------
propman
I think this business model has a far greater chance of succeeding than
something like Tesla's. It's easier to just focus on a small averagely
populated area than high density urban cities or in Tesla's case, the entire
country. It's safer to deal with construction/road issues, unique quirks
present of each city when you're only focusing on one community at a time.

It's far less of a headache dealing with one set of regulations for a
community that has few, impressionable decisionmakers than trying to scale
while trying to meet ever-changing individual regulations from each state/city
and an uncertain national landscape. Only Google and the big automakers have
the available influence to push for federal regulation standards and even
those can be scrapped if some major incident happens or morons refuse to
follow proper safety protocols to chase profits (uber).

If Tesla pushes level 4 or 5 autonomy, they need to consider every
circumstance (rain, snow, dust storms, tornadoes, ice, and so many other
random unique Mother Nature quirks), every road construction issue, hazards,
fallen trees etc. all at once. It just isn't feasible. You need city employees
to report fallen trees, garbage truck routes, area with frequent deer or
animal crossings etc. They can't just say it's autonomous in one particular
area where maybe only 100 Teslas are present, it's just not economical.

I think this route of small community adaptation is the most likely and it's
great to see most players shift to this model. This means that automakers
aren't going to be the big players in this space for another decade or so.
It's not economical for big beuracratic, slow moving businesses like Ford to
enter into this landscape. Small companies and startups pushing into this has
its advantages and disadvantages however.

~~~
alehul
I'd just like to point out that Tesla as you're speaking of it is a car
manufacturer, whereas Voyage is a car service.

Tesla is apparently planning to launch their own car service, which from an
economic standpoint may be poised to win. It will involve Tesla owners being
able to add their car to a public fleet and essentially have their car make
money for them.

It's plausible the Tesla model will win out because, in the majority of hours,
only about 20% of the fleet is used in a car service. RideAustin, as a
nonprofit, has publicly available ride data to support this. So with a
dedicated fleet, you'll often have a lot of unused cars that will be quite
inefficient. With the Tesla model, however, the money-making portion is a
secondary purpose for the car's ownership, with the primary one being the
owner's own convenience when needed.

Hope this is explained accurately!

~~~
pfisch
If you can afford a Tesla why would you let your car be used like this?

I am the kind of person who would get a tesla and I would never want to deal
with the inconvenience of lending my car to a public fleet so it could get
fucked up by drunk people.

Also how does the car know if someone throws up in it before picking up
another passenger?

~~~
itsgrimetime
What if it made you an extra $6000 per month? Even $3000?

Obviously the market would adjust from current taxi rates, but this is based
off of the following rough estimate:

20 hours per day of you not driving * 30 days * 11$ avg taxi take-home per
hour[1] = $6600

[1]: [https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/taxi-driver-
and-c...](https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/taxi-driver-and-
chauffeur/salary)

~~~
dx034
Most car owners today could save money by owning a different car, reducing the
cars in the household or using more public transport.

Owning a car is (for most) not just a necessity, it's an expression of
freedom. Being reliant on a car sharing app is not ideal for everyone, esp.
families.

------
jknz
Congratulations.

Especially if there are serious competitors in this space, governments could
enact laws that speed up safety requirements (and maybe speed up innovation
too).

One thought: Governments could force driverless companies to share their data,
in some inter-operable format (think a 3D map, or 6D if you had speed
information?) that could be read by other cars nearby. For instance if there
is a stroller with a baby in front of the car in front of you, or if an
accident happened in the street you are about to enter, you would be able to
read it from the information emitted from cars that are closer to the
danger/obstacle. Current technologies allow this. My guess is that sensors
will gain substantially in terms of robustness. (Imagine what you can do with
one set of lidar/thermocamera/visial cameras; now imagine what you can do with
data from 10 of these sets from different locations!)

Smaller players (such as Voyage, although it seems you got there far already!)
would probably benefit from this and it would benefit competition/innovation.
Governments would likely be happy to force this into law because if it makes
sense for safety.

Anyway, congrats for the real-life launch

------
alehul
I haven't heard of Voyage before, but this is interesting.

Would it be accurate to summarize that while most autonomous car companies are
going for gradually higher levels of autonomy nationwide/worldwide, Voyage has
the opposite strategy of starting at a higher level of autonomy in one
controlled community and will aim to expand geographically from there?

~~~
olivercameron
Correct! We think people would be surprised at how big some of these private
communities are, and how many places look like them other than retirement
communities.

------
Isamu
With a human behind the wheel, with hands off? Or are they really launching
with nobody in the vehicle?

~~~
olivercameron
Human behind the wheel today. A key reason we choose private communities is
that we see it as a way to remove that Test Driver much faster, though.

------
lolc
"Beginning in early 2018, we’ll start rolling out a door-to-door self-driving
taxi service to residents."

Now? Isn't that a bit optimistic? To me it looks like they have just one car
for testing. At least they understand that they need the environment mapped to
a very fine degree.

~~~
taneq
Relying on fine-grained maps always seems to me like the Wrong Way to do these
things. Fine-grained maps are guaranteed to be wrong, so you can't rely on
them. And if you don't rely on them then you don't need them.

~~~
lolc
It's how you start. At some point computers will have general cognition at a
level that enables them to understand typical traffic situations and
improvise. Right now the road network is not standardized enough for them to
rely on their sensors. One way streets? Need a plan. Turn regulations? Plan!
Interpretation of lights? Hah, plan. Go over a curb? Not in the plan!

They simply can't take those decisions. Yet. As companies such as this make
headway, roads will become more standardized to help them along.

------
dhruvp
Pretty cool idea to go to private, well constrained areas so that it scopes
down the problem and allows for quick iteration. Good luck! Excited to see
autonomous vehicles in these environments.

~~~
olivercameron
Thank you Dhruv!

------
lovemenot
This sounds really a great project. Good luck.

I wonder there was any consideration given to just adding automnomy as a
module to the golf-carts that are currently widely used in these communities.
It seems that could allow for faster deployment, lower legal barriers and
lower capital investment.

The autonomous vehicles in Black Mirror's recent _Hang the DJ_ fits this
concept.

------
kldavis4
More details on wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida#Autonomo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida#Autonomous_vehicles)

------
nathan_f77
I had no idea that retirement communities could grow to the size of cities.
This place is amazing [1] [2]. Peter Thiel and Y Combinator talk about
building cities or planned communities, but it looks like it's already been
done. And now they're adding fully autonomous vehicles. I think this is also
the perfect place to test fully automated grocery stores, restaurants, and
home automation. You could set up automatic payments for everything via facial
recognition / GPS / bluetooth. I never considered that the "city of the
future" would be a retirement community with lots of elderly people.

I wonder if they have security cameras covering every street, similar to the
UK. You could set up some facial tracking across all the cameras, and a
centralized security system in every house, and it might become the safest
city in the world. It could also make a great episode of Black Mirror.

I work remotely on my laptop, and my wife and I have a lot of hobbies,
including yoga, ballet, archery, art, music [3]. We're living in Chiang Mai,
and many of the archery club members are retirees from the UK. So we're
already interacting out with some older people, and don't have any qualms
about it. All residents of The Villages must be over the age of 19, but 20% of
the houses can be owned by younger people who live by themselves. Not saying
we would want to live there, but it's not too hard to imagine.

This would also be a great place to build home automation startups (or even
city automation), just like Voyage is doing. For example, many of the
residents might be able to afford robotic chefs [4]. The system could
automatically order your groceries, and they'd be delivered by a self-driving
Voyage car. Then another robot in your house could receive the delivery and
store the food in your smart refrigerator.

It also makes me realize that a blockchain might be unnecessary. You trust
your neighbors, you trust the people who manage the community, and you trust
the legal system, lawyers, judges, and prisons. So there's probably no need
for a trustless payment network in a community like this. The Octopus card
works fine in Hong Kong, and it's just integers in a database.

Lots of people are working from home these days, so I think this might lead to
more planned communities. The digital nomad lifestyle is great for a while,
but it gets exhausting after a few years. Hopefully there will some
communities that are geared towards younger people and people with families.
I've also been following the High Street Cohousing Project [5] in New Zealand.
Would be very interested to hear about other cohousing projects and planned
communities.

[1] [https://www.thevillages.com](https://www.thevillages.com)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida)

[3]
[https://www.thevillages.com/calendar/](https://www.thevillages.com/calendar/)

[4] [http://www.moley.com/](http://www.moley.com/)

[5] [http://highstreetcohousing.nz/](http://highstreetcohousing.nz/)

~~~
greeneggs
Perhaps a less obvious benefit is financial. No schools saves a lot of
property tax.

~~~
nicksergeant
The Wikipedia post seems to indicate that they are still zoned to school
districts.

