startup promise self-driving taxi
Another startup promises self-driving taxis 'soon'
Popular online learning service Udacity already trains engineers for work in the fast-growing autonomous vehicles field, but now the company is ready to harness all that talent and launch its own self-driving taxi company. Led by CEO (and former Udacity Vice President) Oliver Cameron, the new spin-off company will be called Voyage and has given itself the goal of getting autonomous taxis to "real users" in less than five years. As Cameron noted on Twitter, he thinks Voyage can hit that goal thanks to a "maturing" ecosystem that will allow the company to add autonomous functions to existing vehicles without needing to build a new self-driving car from the ground up. According to Business Insider, Voyage plans to differentiate itself from the competition at Uber and Lyft by allowing riders to control the experience with voice commands that set destination, add additional stops or simply control music playback. Although the company didn't specify which markets it would enter first, Voyage is aiming to start test rides with real passengers "very soon" -- possibly in the next few months.