The rapid succession of robotaxi deployments from companies like Waymo and Zoox have people in the industry, once again, dreaming about how autonomous vehicles might change our daily lives. That includes driverless taxi rides, sure, but also headier ideas like sending an autonomous vehicle to fetch groceries or pick up dry cleaning.
If those things are ultimately going to happen, navigating the handoff moments — like where exactly a vehicle should stop to receive the groceries — will be a crucial piece of the puzzle. Palo Alto-based Autolane is trying to build that layer of infrastructure, and it now has $7.4 million in fresh funding to take on that goal.
Backed by VC firms like Draper Associates and Hyperplane, Autolane said it will start by coordinating pickup and drop-off points for companies that want to let robotaxis come onto their private property. The startup has signed a deal with Simon Property Group to coordinate driverless vehicle arrivals and departures at shopping centers owned by the real estate company in Austin, Texas and San Francisco, California.
This deal will include creating simple, physical infrastructure like signage (think: the many kinds of Uber and Lyft pick-up and drop-off stanchions that decorate modern hotels and airports) and also software.
“I believe we are one of the first, let’s say, ‘application layer’ companies in autonomy,” Autolane co-founder and CEO Ben Seidl told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “We aren’t the fundamental models. We’re not building the cars. We’re not doing anything like that. We are simply saying, as this industry balloons rapidly and has exponential growth — as is already occurring this year and will occur for the next 10 years straight — someone is going to have to sit in the middle and orchestrate, coordinate, and kind of evaluate what’s going on.”
Autolane is starting with robotaxis in mind, but Seidl is clearly focused on the bigger-picture idea of applying his company’s tech to all kinds of tasks autonomous vehicles might be able to perform in the future. And he wants to move quickly with Autolane because, as he sees it, the startup doesn’t have “any direct competition” right now. He expects that to change soon.
Seidl said he was convinced there was a business here after buying a Tesla last year and using the company’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver assistance software for the first time.
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“As soon as my own personal car was driving me around town, pretty much flawlessly, I just — my head kind of exploded,” he said. “I was mostly enthralled by the idea that this was going to change logistics, retail, real estate, where we work, where we live, where we play, how we get around, what the price of movement of goods and services and people will be.”
Seidl cited the viral incident from earlier this year where a Waymo robotaxi got stuck navigating a Chick-fil-A drive-through in Santa Monica, California, as an example of the problem Autolane is trying to head off. In that case, the robotaxi had dropped off its passengers and then struggled to negotiate the fast food company’s notorious drive-through lanes. Seidl said by using Autolane software and designating an exact pick-up and drop-off location, problems like this can be avoided in the future.
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