Yahoo Autos Self-Driving Shuttles Meet the Motor City
In the shadow of one of the largest automakers in the world, a small startup is taking some of the first steps toward making the much hyped, much ballyhooed self-driving future a reality.
May Mobility, a provider of self-driving shuttles, is launching service along a dedicated route in downtown Detroit. Beginning June 27, the company started using five of its six-passenger electric vehicles to ferry commuters from a parking garage to their nearby offices under autonomous control.
For now, the shuttles only serve employees of Bedrock, a commercial real-estate firm owned by Quicken Loans magnate Dan Gilbert. But this is the first phase in an expected expansion from one route to many throughout the city. Broadly, the company’s founders tout the shuttles as a means to help solve the long-standing transportation challenge of connecting commuters to their final destinations. They also tout it as a full-fledged service that has graduated from the experimental ranks of similar endeavors.
“This is no longer a science project,” says Alisyn Malek, chief operating officer and co-founder of May Mobility. “It’s transportation reality.”
That reality is taking shape in an office and operations center that’s literally across the street from the Renaissance Center, the towering General Motors global headquarters that dominates the Detroit skyline. While GM has its own autonomous ambitions and intends to start an automated ride-hailing service sometime in 2019, the fact that a startup has kicked off self-driving operations next door says something about the frenzied pace of innovation in both the transportation industry and the city of Detroit.
In the latter, Bedrock has been a driving force. Over the past seven years, Bedrock has purchased nearly 100 properties in the city and has been an undisputed contributor to Detroit’s economic revitalization. Company executives say 17,000 employees now work in its downtown properties, many of them suburbanites who place a high value on ease of parking.
“When we first started bringing people downtown, the first question was always, ‘How is this going to work? Where am I going to park?,’ ” said Jim Ketai, Bedrock’s chief executive officer, who was on hand for May Mobility’s debut.
Bedrock’s influence in the region was apparent in its leadership of Detroit’s bid to woo Amazon’s second headquarters and its expected tens of thousands of new employees to the Motor City. Those efforts failed. In the reckoning that followed, Bedrock identified transportation shortcomings as a major reason Amazon is looking elsewhere. Gilbert minced no words in a memo circulated to employees titled “The Elephant in the Room.”
“The region’s lack of effective, comprehensive transit infrastructure was a gating issue in Amazon’s decision-making process,” he wrote. “We need to take investment in transit infrastructure very seriously. Companies like Amazon and their employee base require dynamic and reliable transit. If we are determined to attract exciting opportunities to metropolitan Detroit, then it’s time to get in a room and figure it out. Now.”
Seeking to play a catalyst role, Bedrock partnered with May Mobility last October to run a pilot project connecting its Bricktown parking garage with nearby offices via autonomous shuttles. The pilot allowed May Mobility to train its self-driving systems with a high degree of confidence along the route. It was met with enthusiasm from employees, so that’s the route the shuttles are now running for this inaugural commercial service.
“During the course of the pilot, we were gathering feedback, and the obvious question was, ‘Were folks hesitant to ride on a self-driving vehicle?’,” said Kevin Bopp, vice president of parking and mobility at Bedrock. “They came back with two things: ‘Please add cupholders and music.’ ”
May Mobility’s shuttles will replace 25-seat diesel buses that Bedrock had been using to connect its office buildings and parking garages. Bopp expects the new shuttles to better utilize capacity, pollute less than the diesels, and reduce wait times from 10 minutes to four.
From its garage on Franklin Street, May Mobility will keep three shuttles in service for 19 hours a day, through all weather conditions, every day of the year. At the onset of service, they expect to transport roughly 200 employees per day. Human safety drivers-officially dubbed “fleet attendants,” the elevator operators of the modern day-will remain onboard for the foreseeable future, the company said.
The shuttles, based on a Polaris GEM platform, have undergone an overhaul since last October’s pilot project. Traditional steering wheels have been replaced with control sticks more akin to the yokes found on airplanes. The sensor suite of lidar, radar, and cameras has been revamped for better feeding into the system’s behavioral planner. Rear doors have been lengthened-engineers found the first passengers aboard were likely to sit in the seat nearest the door, and a longer door helps give others more room.
Underlining the magnitude of the project is that May Mobility recently formed a partnership with Magna, the global automotive supplier. After building its first two prototypes, May Mobility’s engineers realized they needed a partner with expertise in manufacturing to produce the shuttles at scale. Currently, Magna is slated to retrofit the shuttles, making modifications such as the custom doors, adding a panoramic moonroof to provide riders with expansive views of the cityscape, and outfitting the interior with rear-facing seats in the middle row.
Parts for the shuttles now ship directly to Magna’s engineering hub in Troy, Michigan. Right now, Magna is working on 20 shuttles for May Mobility, but there’s the likelihood the number will climb significantly higher as business expands.
“May came to us, and they said, ‘Hey, we know this what we want to do, but we don’t know the most efficient way to do it,’ ” said Michael Duddles, a senior account manager with Magna, who oversees the shuttle assembly. “They said, ‘We think you have that knowledge, and we’d love for you to work on it.’ We can make it consistent, make it scale.”
Although the era of autonomous travel remains in a fledgling stage, the ability to scale up from startup and pilot projects has already become a make-or-break factor. May Mobility needs shuttles for its planned expansion with Bedrock in Detroit, and it’s eyeing further partnerships in Florida and Texas.
Elsewhere, competitors are ramping up. Drive.ai plans to launch self-driving service in July that will connect a suburban office park in the northern Dallas suburbs with nearby restaurant and entertainment options. The company is conducting the service using Nissan NV200 vans, the same vehicle used in New York City taxi service. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, a French company, Navya, has deployed an autonomous shuttle on the campus of the University of Michigan. The company has also run shuttles along the Las Vegas Strip as part of a pilot project there.
The details vary in each case as to the target audience, the routes utilized, the number of seats available, and the vehicles used. But the projects are all operating with the same general idea: usher in a new era of niche mobility by using autonomous technology to connect people in or around campuses or specific urban environments.
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For May Mobility, conducting commercial operations in a complex city like Detroit is a tangible first step. It’s also an opportunity to ensure that all the pieces-from manufacturing to fleet management to the business case to the technology itself-can all work cohesively on a daily basis before aspirations and service scale across the region and points beyond.
“This is year-round transportation for people as part of their daily lives,” said Steve Vozar, May Mobility’s chief technology officer. “We didn’t want to do a tourist attraction. This is skin in the game.”
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