<\/p>\n
Many innovations have a crucial graduation date: when they move from speculative R&D to real-world deployment and utility.<\/p>\n
One of the more significant transitions underway is the rise of \u201cautonomy as a service\u201d (AaaS), a model where self-driving capabilities are not just embedded in cars but delivered as scalable platforms that are often entirely devoid of human drivers.<\/p>\n
This, in turn, is giving rise to \u201cdriver-out\u201d vehicles: machines that operate with no safety driver on board, signaling a bold leap toward fully autonomous logistics and mobility systems. Look no further for the tech\u2019s graduation date than May Mobility\u2019s recent partnership<\/a> with Uber to provide thousands of vehicles with autonomous vehicle (AV) technology for proof of where the landscape could be heading.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know from the Waymo service that people are willing to wait longer for an autonomous vehicle. They\u2019re willing to pay more, they prefer it so strongly,\u201d Edwin Olson<\/a>, CEO and co-founder of May Mobility<\/a>, told PYMNTS. \u00a0\u201cAnd for companies like Uber<\/a>, they know they need to be able to compete with that.\u201d<\/p>\n For ride-hailing platforms, the economics of autonomy are compelling. Drivers, or more specifically, driver-associated costs, remain the biggest expense. Removing that variable opens up significant margins and also helps to eliminate variability due to labor shortages, hours-of-service regulations and human error.<\/p>\n The journey to fully autonomous ride-hailing is also about designing artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can handle the unpredictability of real-world road occasions.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the dark ages \u2026 there was a lot of just the intelligence of the programmer directly embedded within the DNA of the vehicle,\u201d Olson said. \u201cNow, AI methods are really the go-to approach for building autonomous vehicles.\u201d<\/p>\n But machine learning on its own hasn\u2019t been enough. Companies, Olson argued, have underestimated the volume of data needed to make AI systems truly reliable.<\/p>\n \u201cMost AV companies have run out of cash before they\u2019ve collected enough data to fully train those systems,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n May Mobility\u2019s own answer is what it calls multi-policy decision making (MPDM) \u2014 a kind of cognitive leap that adds reasoning capabilities to the autonomous stack. Rather than endlessly training a model on edge cases, MPDM simulates possible futures in real time.<\/p>\n \u201cImagine a forest of parallel universes,\u201d Olson said. \u201cIn one of the universes, the pedestrian jaywalks. In another one, the pedestrian waits their turn.\u201d<\/p>\n The system models these futures 1,000 times per second, scores each one for safety, comfort and legality, and chooses the best path forward. \u201cWe can do this reinforcement learning on the car in about 0.2 seconds,\u201d Olson said. \u201cDriving is much more like a dance than anything else. It\u2019s all highly coupled.\u201d<\/p>\n For incumbents and startups alike, the real question is not if autonomy will scale, but how to position oneself in a world where mobility is no longer just a product, but a service. Still, technology alone isn\u2019t enough to win the race. Olson pointed out that scaling autonomy requires solving four interdependent problems: building vehicles, sourcing demand, managing fleets and mastering autonomy itself.<\/p>\n On the vehicle front, May has a deep relationship with Toyota, which builds the vehicles May\u2019s technology powers. \u201cToyota can build all the vehicles we can eat,\u201d Olson says, only half-joking. For demand, May is tapping into Uber and Lyft\u2019s platforms.<\/p>\n Instead of convincing millions of people to download a new app, May\u2019s driverless cars will show up right alongside human-driven ones in apps people already use.<\/p>\n One of the most surprising lessons from May\u2019s journey, Olson said, is how willing people are to try autonomy. Especially if it makes their lives easier.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s often a sentiment expressed that, oh, you know, adoption\u2019s going to be a real barrier. And here, I actually just totally disagree,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n His evidence? Human behavior. \u201cIf you went back in a time machine 15 years ago and said, \u2018Would you get into a car driven by a complete stranger?\u2019 people would say no. But then you land in San Francisco and you need a ride \u2026 and suddenly it\u2019s fine,\u201d Olson said.<\/p>\n Autonomous vehicles, he argued, follow the same pattern. \u201cIf you can solve a real-world problem, make their lives more convenient, they\u2019re going to adopt this.\u201d That doesn\u2019t mean safety isn\u2019t paramount \u2014 \u201cIt\u2019s one of our absolute pillars,\u201d he said \u2014 but public trust, he believes, comes through utility first.<\/p>\n And if the future sounds like science fiction, Olson would remind you: it\u2019s already on the road today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many innovations have a crucial graduation date: when they move from speculative R&D to real-world deployment and utility. One of the more significant transitions underway is the rise of \u201cautonomy as a service\u201d (AaaS), a model where self-driving capabilities are not just embedded in cars but delivered as scalable platforms that are often entirely devoid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":394701,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[188,183,185,186,187,184,189,150,182,190],"class_list":["post-394700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-blockchain-tech","tag-blockchain-technology","tag-crypto-technology","tag-cryptocurrency-technology","tag-metaverse-technology","tag-nft-technology","tag-soul-bound-token","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-token-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394700"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":394702,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394700\/revisions\/394702"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Bringing the Driver-Out Experience to Life<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Autonomous Adoption Won\u2019t be the Hard Part<\/strong><\/h2>\n