I founded ClariNet, the world's first internet based business, am Chairman Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a fellow of the Foresight Institute. My current passion is self-driving vehicles and robots.
May companies have produced or announced plans for a custom-designed robotaxi. As interesting as it is, the vehicle design is only the 3rd most important ingredient for a robotaxi service, but there’s still lots to talk about. The first ingredient is a safe and capable self-driving software system, along with the sensor suite.
After these, though, there’s a physical vehicle, and from a customer standpoint that’s actually the most visible face of the service. Tesla states they plan a robotaxi, and will show off concepts for that physical form in October. They had originally hoped to do so in August, but have delayed. There is as yet no timeline when Tesla will have working software and they’ve shown almost no work as yet on infrastructure.
Most players have modified existing cars, at least for their pilot projects. Some designed custom vehicles with varying levels of innovation. GM’s Cruise had a custom vehicle called the Origin, but it recently put it on the back shelf, at least for now. Waymo how has some of their fairly basic custom vehicle in testing. Amazon’s Zoox has been about the custom vehicle since day one, it is their raison d'être.
Starting with a standard car has a big economic advantage. Lots of companies know all you need to know about making cars similar to today’s. There’s almost zero risk. In addition, you can start with much cheaper off-lease cars, and also re-sell the cars if they don’t work out or get too old for robotaxi service. Custom vehicles are custom for life, and feature lots of design risk.
A robotaxi has to be easy to clean and an ability for automatic charging is also important—though since the car is a robot, the charging stations need only minimal robotics to use standard plugs. More radical ideas could include battery swap and an ice chamber to store cooling “energy” more cheaply than lithium batteries do it.
Zoox Waymo Tesla Verne Self-Driving Driverless Cruise
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