Cabin Cloud is almost here!

November 1st marks the one year anniversary of Cabin starting nightly service — and we’re excited to introduce you to our next chapter.

Since launching, we have transported over 11,000 guests, taken over 600 trips, delivered over 4 million passenger miles, and learned a thing or two about long-distance mobility.

As a direct response to our invaluable guest feedback, our team has spent the better part of the last year developing a bump-canceling technology we call Cabin Cloud (which you can read more about in Wired & Mashable). We can now eliminate 80–90% of the bumpiness you feel on the road, making US highways feel smoother than trains.

Now it’s time to move out of the lab.

We are thrilled to announce that starting on November 1st we will begin upgrading our vehicles with our new Cabin Cloud suspension and will also be tripling our fleet size in the new year!

This means that every single bed in our vehicles will be outfitted with our patent-pending, snooze-inducing tech. Soon, just about anyone will be able to get a dreamy night’s sleep while on a moving vehicle.

My Co-founder and CTO, Tom, and I wanted to take this opportunity to look back at our first year of operations and give a sneak peak of what’s to come.

Year Zero

When Tom and I decided to start Cabin, we had a clear vision: to change where (and how) people spent their time by creating effortless long-distance mobility. One of our core beliefs was that if we could make vehicles feel like living spaces that move, we could minimize travel friction and provide people with the feeling of teleportation.

We launched with what was basically a pod hotel that moved from San Francisco to Santa Monica. Based on guest feedback, we got most of the hotel hospitality part spot-on. However, some of our guests complained about bumpiness. For us to truly fulfill our vision, we needed to understand motion because hotel rooms don’t normally move.

So behind the scenes, our team has been working diligently in our secret Sleep Lab to solve Cabin’s core technical challenge: eliminating the sense of motion while in transport.

Zero to Sixty in Three Minutes

In a passenger-centric world, you don’t want to feel motion. If you want to read, eat, work or sleep, you want your driver to slowly accelerate and slowly brake. You want them to ease into every curve and switch lanes carefully (you also want the government to repave every road in America).

Almost as soon as we started operating, we began logging every piece of data we could around what our passengers were feeling. From there we developed a technical roadmap to address all axes of motion affecting our guests.

For up-and-down motion, or the Z-axis, we created Cabin Cloud — the first-ever active suspension system designed specifically for passenger sleep.

What we haven’t talked about publicly is our solution for the X and Y-axis. For motion relating to what the driver controls — steering, braking and accelerating — we developed Cabin Drive.

Cabin Cloud feels like a Highway Train

Cabin Cloud, is our hardware solution to eliminate “bumpiness,” or Z-axis motion. When going over a bump, Cabin Cloud instantly responds by moving a guest’s bed up or down to mute the vibration. The technology essentially transforms a bump that would take a passenger out of the deepest sleep, into a bump that they wouldn’t even notice.

Beyond sleep, the same tech will allow guests to read and work on their laptops without nausea, drink coffee or wine without worrying that a sudden bump will cause them to spill, and even one day work-out or eat a five-star meal while onboard our fleet.

Introducing Cabin Drive

But Cabin Cloud can’t solve our problems alone, and we’ve learned that driver and road conditions impact our sleeping guests as much as the potholes that go bump in the night. From acceleration to lane switching, how you drive greatly affects the felt motion for passengers.

For example, velocity alone can have an enormous effect on felt acceleration. We have mapped every pothole and junction from here to LA. On one overpass, reducing speed by 8 miles per hour has a 42% effect on felt acceleration.

So on the software side, we’ve developed Cabin Drive — an app that constantly tracks vehicle stability versus driver inputs and displays an optimal way to drive based on route and road conditions. As we accumulate more and more actual trips, we can use machine learning to constantly optimize the ‘perfect’ drive over a given route. Think of it as Waze that helps you get from point A to point B with as little felt motion as possible.

We’re excited to share more on this soon and anticipate Cabin Drive 1.0 will launch at the same time as our new, Cloud-enabled fleet.

Be our Guest

Applying these new technologies to our fleet and delivering the best version of Cabin to our guests is our top priority. Upgrading our fleet is just the beginning. We look forward to continue to develop guest-focused technology and services to make long-distance travel feel as effortless as possible.

For those of you who have tried Cabin, we cannot thank you enough for your patronage and the feedback that is fueling our innovations. For those of you who have not yet tried Cabin, we invite you to be our guest and help us build this future.

We’re excited to resume regular service with our all-new fleet in early 2019.

See you soon!

Gaetano Crupi, Cabin Co-Founder and CEO

For the latest updates on service and availability we encourage you to sign up for Cabin’s mailing list here.