Our Journey to Driverless Cars
Reflections on two years of rapid progress at Voyage
At Voyage, our mission is to deliver on the promise of self-driving cars. Self-driving technology will democratize access to safe, affordable, and reliable transportation.
Although other self-driving car projects share Voyage’s mission, our strategy is unique. One day, our technology will be able to safely drive a car on any roadway at any speed at any time of day. However, instead of waiting for that day before building a business, we are focused on partnering with large communities where we can commercialize the state-of-the-art in self-driving technology today. As the state-of-the-art advances, we will commercialize our technology at progressively more complex communities.
Our strategy follows in the footsteps of the truly exceptional technology companies of our time. Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Tesla, and others began by dominating a niche and expanding to broader markets with the enormous momentum they’d built. We are taking this same path.
We’ve been busy working on this strategy for the last two years, and we wanted to share our progress toward delivering on the promise of self-driving cars. Watch our latest video below to see just how far our self-driving technology has advanced.
“Your market entry strategy is often different from your market disruption. Start where you find a gap in the market and push your way through.” — Vinod Khosla
Two Years of Progress
Two years ago, we launched our first-generation fleet of self-driving cars at a small retirement community in San Jose. It blows my mind to think how far Voyage has come since then.
Today, Voyage’s self-driving technology is robust, reliable, and capable of complex interactions and maneuvers. We launched our second-generation fleet of self-driving cars with best-in-class sensors and compute, signed unique maintenance and insurance deals with companies like Enterprise and Intact, expanded operations from a 4,000 resident retirement community in San Jose to a 125,000 resident retirement city in Florida, and grew our deployment waitlist to communities containing over 1.1 million residents.
Best of all, we expanded our team of Voyagers from 5 to 50. World-class engineers joined us from great companies like Cruise, Tesla, Uber ATG, Apple SPG, Google, NIO, Twitter, SpaceX, and more. We also welcomed Drew Gray as our CTO, after he built autonomous vehicles at Tesla, Cruise, Otto, and Uber ATG.
Voyage began in retirement communities two years ago because we believed the calm roadway offers a clear path to truly driverless cars today. The progress we’ve made on our self-driving technology has validated that this is true. What’s more, we’ve also validated the transportation opportunity ahead of us, after seeing incredible demand from residents for our product.
Our Next Steps
Our progress to driverless has been rapid. While some are pessimistic about the future of autonomous vehicles, I couldn’t be more excited about what’s to come. 2020 is the dawn of safe, affordable, and reliable transportation.
Our first driverless product (with no Test Driver) is a car that can travel point-to-point within our communities fully autonomously. The self-driving car will initially be limited to 25MPH, the natural driving speed within our communities, but capable of handling complex traffic interactions. With that tightly defined scope we will be generating revenue from passengers in truly driverless cars sooner than many think. As the state-of-the-art advances, we will advance our self-driving technology with more capabilities, such as faster speeds, enabling driverless in progressively more complex communities. This is our strategy and strength.
Moving Fast with Focus
Because of our tightly defined scope and focus, we’ve been able to make fast progress on a number of complex traffic scenarios over the last 2 years.
Unprotected Turns
Unprotected turns are one of the trickier scenarios for self-driving cars, especially on roads with fast-moving traffic. At an unprotected turn, a self-driving car needs to perceive objects with high-accuracy coming towards itself. Our self-driving technology is tested on unprotected turns every day, and is intelligent in choosing the exact right moment to execute this complex maneuver. Our ability to master unprotected lefts is aided by the slower-moving traffic within our communities.
Pedestrian Interactions
Our self-driving technology interacts with pedestrians ultra-conservatively, enabled by our initial focus on 25MPH. Our incredibly high-resolution and long-range sensors ensure we detect all pedestrians.
Vehicle Interactions
Human drivers sometimes don’t do what you’d expect. Our intelligent decision-making module predicts thousands of potential scenarios every second, and in the blink of an eye chooses the safest possible plan to execute.
The last two years of development has flown by insanely fast. It’s hard to predict where we will be in two more years, but I am certain we will have begun to deliver on the promise of this technology.
The Opportunity Ahead
Every year, passenger vehicles in the U.S. drive 3 trillion miles. That’s a staggering number. At Voyage, we believe there is significant room for improvement on the experience of every single one of those 3 trillion miles. We will start simpler, in amazing communities like The Villages®, but we won’t stop until anyone, anywhere can summon a Voyage.
P.S. We are hiring for all positions across Voyage. Join our fast-growing team!
