Let’s face it: American roads aren’t friendly places for pedestrians. They often feature ungodly numbers of extra-wide lanes, infinite parking lots, and tons of active driveways for cars to access chain stores and restaurants.
As it turns out, American roads aren’t too friendly to self-driving cars, either. At least not yet, according to Ben Seidl, CEO and co-founder of Autolane, a startup working on “air traffic control” for autonomous vehicles.
In an interview with TechCrunch, the founder described the company as one of the first “application layer” companies in the self-driving vehicle industry. Basically, Autolane is building infrastructure to help autonomous vehicles know exactly where to go for pick-up and drop-off. That includes all kinds of cargo: humans for robotaxis, but also grocery and meal delivery, according to Seidl.
“We aren’t the fundamental models. We’re not building the cars. We’re not doing anything like that,” he told TC. “We are simply saying, as this industry balloons rapidly and has exponential growth… someone is going to have to sit in the middle and orchestrate, coordinate, and kind of evaluate what’s going on.”
Seidl says he got his inspiration for the company from a viral incident earlier this year, in which a Waymo robotaxi got itself stuck in one of Chick-fil-A’s fast food cul-de-sacs. Thanks to some cash injections from venture capital firms, Autolane now has some $7.4 million to throw at a potential solution.
“Someone has got to bring some order to this chaos, and the chaos is already starting,” Seidl declared.
The founder’s vision points to an interesting dilemma: on roads designed for humans in cars at the expense of humans without cars, how prepared are we for cars without humans?
But if, as some urban planners have suggested, autonomous vehicles enable a new kind of urbanism designed for efficiency and connection, Seidl and his company aren’t interested in it. Speaking to TC, the CEO made it abundantly clear he’s only keen on fast food restaurants and big box retail stores — cities and municipal transit agencies are a nonstarter.
“We don’t work on public streets. We don’t work with public parking spots. We’re just providing these tools as kind of a B2B, hardware-enabled SAS solution so that Costco, or McDonald’s, or Home Depot,” Seidl said. “Or, in our case, Simon Property Group, the world’s largest retail REIT [real estate investment trust] can begin to have what I like to refer to as ‘air traffic control for autonomous vehicles,’ meaning they know which ones are incoming and outgoing.”
Ultimately, what would really fix the problem for self-driving cars is a redesign of our hostile, car-centric suburban landscapes — which makes it all the more disappointing that the next $7 million idea isn’t smarter urban design, but traffic control for fast food restaurants.
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