Introducing the Voyage G2 Autonomous Vehicle

Scaling our remarkable autonomous fleet with Enterprise

Irene Grim, one of our passengers from The Villages, San Jose

The G2

At Voyage, our mission is to serve communities with autonomous vehicles. We power critical, everyday services with our autonomous fleets, including door-to-door transportation for senior citizens in an amazing community of 125,000 residents.

For the last year, we’ve worked side-by-side with our communities to refine our self-driving taxi service. Today, we’re taking that a step further with the introduction of our second generation (G2) vehicle.

The G2 is a big step forward for Voyage and our communities. The G2 vehicle is based on the widely acclaimed Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid mini-van, and is paired with a first-of-its-kind partnership with Enterprise to super-charge the scaling of our autonomous fleet. The G2 features incredible new sensor technology from Velodyne, best-in-class safety systems, and Voyage’s own autonomous driving technology. As a team, we are marching incredibly fast toward truly driverless services inside Voyage communities.

Jerry Neece, a frequent Voyage passenger

Voyage ❤️ Enterprise

Scaling Our Autonomous Fleet

A challenge for any autonomous vehicle startup is acquiring vehicles at scale. Buying a few initial vehicles from a local car dealership is sufficient for prototyping, but quickly becomes cost-prohibitive and extremely difficult to scale.

The natural solution to this problem is leasing. Leasing reduces your up-front cash burden and allows you to amortize the vehicle’s value over multiple years of service. Perfect! So what’s the catch? Unless you’re an OEM, you’ll almost certainly need to make major modifications to the vehicle by retro-fitting sensors and compute, typically invalidating a standard lease.

We’ve solved the vehicle scaling problem by establishing a first-of-its-kind partnership with the leader in commercial fleet leasing and maintenance: Enterprise. Enterprise will leverage decades of fleet management experience to procure, lease, and service our fleet of G2 autonomous vehicles. The lease allows Voyage to retrofit vehicles with our self-driving hardware. When the lease term is up, we simply return the vehicle to Enterprise, and recycle any vehicle equity back into expanding our fleet. This is a big deal, and we are incredibly proud to be partnering with Enterprise to define commercial fleet leasing in an increasingly autonomous world.

“Enterprise Fleet Management is excited to provide vehicles and maintenance management to support the expansion of Voyage’s operations. Like Enterprise, Voyage understands that world-class fleet management is fundamental to the long-term success of autonomous fleets.
Our partnership ensures that the Voyage team is able to focus on what they do best — developing autonomous technology and providing transportation services to community residents — without having to worry about acquiring and maintaining those vehicles.”

— Brice Adamson, Senior Vice President at Enterprise Fleet Management


Incredible Sensor Vision

At Voyage, we believe LIDAR is the enabling sensor of autonomous fleets; it allows our vehicles to observe the world with a few special super powers:

  • Continuous 360 degrees of visibility — Imagine if your human eyes allowed you to see in all directions all of the time.
  • Insanely accurate depth information — Imagine if, instead of guessing, you could always know the precise distance (to an accuracy of a few centimeters) of objects in relation to you.

Our first generation autonomous vehicle (fondly referred to as “Homer”) featured a Velodyne HDL-64E LIDAR. The HDL-64E was sufficient for building a prototype vehicle, but always required a Test Driver to be present. To make the leap to driverless, we required a sensor with higher resolution, longer range and improved reliability. Enter the Velodyne VLS-128.

With 128 channels (or lines) of resolution and 300m of range, this is an exceptional sensor that enables our algorithms to process a dense, 3D view of the world in 360 degrees.

The VLS-128

The Velodyne VLS-128 produces more than 3x the number of points of any commercially-available ultra long-range LIDAR sensor. In the time it takes us to blink an eye, the Velodyne VLS-128 lasers fire about one million times, generating an amount of data equivalent to the complete works of Shakespeare! We are proud to be one of the very first customers of this game-changing sensor.

The VLS-128
“Autonomous vehicles promise to greatly improve transportation efficiency, convenience and safety in our communities. Velodyne is pleased to be selected by Voyage as a key technology supplier to accelerate vehicle development and deployment. We can’t wait to see Velodyne’s VLS-128 market leading L4 performance in operation with Voyage!”

— Mike Jellen, President at Velodyne

Blind-spot coverage

Best-in-Class Safety Systems

At Voyage, our single biggest responsibility is ensuring the safety of our passengers. Our vehicles endure rigorous safety validation, and are designed with multiple levels of redundancy that deliver safe operation when the unexpected happens. As a company, we’ve invested heavily in the reliability of our most safety-critical systems.

We will soon be announcing a new partnership with a world-class team that’s built an integrated hardware and software development platform designed specifically to support driverless, Level 4 capable vehicles. From hardware-enforced state machines, to real-time execution of critical safety procedures, our partner has developed a middleware layer that enables our custom-built autonomous technology to be deployed responsibly.


Remarkable Autonomous Technology

We’ve been working for close to two years on our autonomous technology, and progress has been rapid! Our vehicles intelligently and autonomously navigate the complex neighborhoods of our communities, to safely transport our amazing passengers from door-to-door.

Our Perception and Decision Making modules are constantly evaluating the world 10 times every second, utilizing the incredible sensor resolution and range on our G2 vehicle to produce amazing results. In addition to continuously observing the world around us, we also monitor our vehicle systems and hardware for abnormalities. We call this our Doctor module, which monitors the health of each and every part of our vehicle multiple times a second.

Take our sensors, for example. We don’t just observe the on/off state of each sensor, but continuously process its output to see if it matches what we’d expect to see. If a plastic bag happens to fly up and cover one of our sensors, our Doctor algorithms automatically identify the abnormality, and inform our systems so that we can safely handle the situation.

We will have more news later this year about some of the ways we’re approaching autonomous technology very differently.


The Villages, Florida

Our communities will be some of the very first in the world to see large-scale driverless car deployments. By developing our autonomous technology in solvable environments that contain meaningful customers, we believe our path to driverless is clear. Our G2 vehicles are a big piece of this puzzle, and we can’t wait until they’re serving thousands of passengers per day!