May Mobility places autonomous vehicle bet on retirees

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Considering the recent challenges faced by the industry, any incremental progress in autonomous vehicles seems extra important these days. Ann Arbor, Mich.-based May Mobility today said it’s deploying fully driverless vehicles at a retirement community in the Phoenix metro area. This will be the first time passengers can ride in the vehicles without a human safety driver inside.

Starting on Dec. 19, two autonomous minivans will be available to a select group of early riders who live in Sun City, a retirement community home to 39,931 people, according to the 2020 census, which is about 14.4 square miles in size. To start, May Mobility said its minivans will cover about 4.5 miles of Sun City, bringing the early riders to a variety of spots such as resident buildings, medical centers, and “other key locations.”

The service will be free to early riders. May Mobility has been testing this service with human safety drivers at Sun City since April 2023. Now it’ll be removing that human backup safety driver. There will be remote human teleoperators in the loop. Here is how they’ll be involved, according to May Mobility:

“At present, each vehicle will be monitored by an individual tele-assist operator to ensure vehicle safety. If remote operators need to take over during remote assistance, the vehicle will come to a stop if it is not already stopped. Then the tele-assist operator will select the best maneuver for the situation so that the vehicle can continue autonomous operations but will not be able to directly steer the vehicle.”

May Mobility’s accomplishments

Founded in 2017, May Mobility has services running at the following locations, but they all feature human safety drivers inside the vehicles:

An aerial view of a May Mobility autonomous vehicle driving through Sun City. | Credit: May Mobility

May Mobility also previously had services in Hiroshima, Japan, Grand Rapids, Mich., and Indianapolis, but they have all been stopped. May Mobility claims to have given “350,000 autonomy-enabled rides to date,” but it’s unclear how many were fully driverless or had a human safety driver inside the vehicle.

“Today, we take the key step of beginning rider-only operations, a cornerstone for our commercial growth and expansion moving forward,” said Edwin Olson, CEO and co-founder of May Mobility. “We believe it is critical to work closely with our key strategic partners, regulators, insurers, and riders, as we roll out our technology step-by-step.”

Like all companies developing autonomous vehicles, May Mobility has had its challenges – see here and here. But those pale in comparison to what we’ve seen from Aurora, Cruise, TuSimple, and others in 2023 alone.

A viable model?

The question going forward is whether partnerships with retirement communities, college campuses, and other public transportation systems are enough to pay the bills. In these cases, May Mobility gets paid by the cities it’s operating in or by transit agencies. This is the opposite of being paid with individual fares, which is the model for Cruise, Waymo, and other developers building out robotaxi services for the public.

Optimus Ride and Voyage were two autonomous vehicle companies that also focused on retirement communities. But neither had commercial success. Voyage was acquired by Cruise in 2021, but its operations were quickly shut down. And Boston-based Optimus Ride had its IP and engineers acquired by Magna International in early 2022.

May Mobility in November 2023 raised a $105 million Series D funding round. This raised its total funding to date to about $300 million. The burn rate for autonomous vehicle companies is typically extremely high. There are 345 LinkedIn users who at press time listed May Mobility as their employer. Cruise just laid off 2.6 times that number (900) of people.

If the early results in Sun City are positive, it will be the first of “many communities globally” that May Mobility wants to roll out a similar service. It believes its approach is more scalable than others, and that it can be the first profitable company developing autonomous vehicles. Looks like we’re about to find out.