Urban travel that’s safe for everyone — without costing the earth
Nearly twenty years ago, I co-founded my first start-up company in the UK and Belgium. We grew our team to 75 people and we built some cool chips and software to enable faster, cheaper broadband to the home. We worked like dogs and we loved it every minute of it.
In the first year alone, I made a total of 26 trips from Europe to the US, where most of our customers were based. We found top talent and made our business so globally significant in its space that it was bought by Broadcom for a whopping $640 million. And that after raising only $13 million of venture capital.
That formula seemed to work, so with a couple of others, I co-founded and led another start-up, this time initially in the UK and France. This time we built some of the world’s best cellular modem chips and software, the core technology that connects your data and voice calls. A much tougher gig, we nevertheless grew that team to more than 300 engineers over 9 years before selling the company to NVIDIA for a cool $430 million.
Over $1 billion in just two companies proves beyond doubt that Europe has an amazing pool of talent which can solve some really hard problems. And if we do that, we can build some good companies and make money.
But are they great? And is that what we should be doing — building companies to feed the growing power of US Tech Titans — or should we be doing something else? Hold that thought.
Let me track back to my childhood for a minute. I was born in a small mill town in Scotland. No one in my family owned a car, so we had no choice but to walk everywhere. Later, we moved to a bigger city in England where we got around on buses. It was fine, but I remember as though it was yesterday the fantastic day my dad got himself a first car. Suddenly our world opened up: fuel was cheap, the roads were empty and amazingly we could now travel anywhere, park the car in the street and enjoy something that felt like true freedom.
Fast forward to today and that magic has gone and, with population and traffic densities as they are now, it’s not coming back anytime soon.
In London, the population is expected to grow by another million people in the next 12 years. It’s already Europe’s biggest city by a factor of about 2. And like many European cities, it was fundamentally designed around the horse, not the car. Today, and despite the best efforts of public transport, everywhere you look it’s congested and sometimes totally gridlocked. As a society, we are burning up the world’s resources in making cars, vans and trucks and we then use them to pollute our environment and, in the process, we are fundamentally diminishing the quality of all our lives.
Later, in old age, my dad had to give up owning a car. And since my mum never learnt to drive, I realised how hard it was to get around if you are old, or young, or not physically able, or you just happen to live in the wrong place or work during the wrong hours.
But it’s not just the socially excluded we should worry about. If I could give you the gift of an extra 230 hours a year (that’s the same as twenty-nine days of eight hours each, by the way), what would you do with it? Well, you probably wouldn’t choose to spend those hours slumped over the wheel of a car travelling at something like 10kph. But almost two thirds of workers in Europe do just that in our everyday commute.
The loss of human potential is enormous. We need a new paradigm.
Here at Five AI, we believe in a future where literally everyone can travel across our cities without driving and without delay. We believe we must achieve that at the lowest possible cost to our planet.
This is why we founded our company and it really does drive everything we do.
“Safe and convenient demand-responsive mobility services, which are so attractive that European city-dwellers don’t feel they need to own a car”
But what does that mean and how do we achieve this?
It means we will build a service for the young, the old, the able, the less able, the wealthy and the less wealthy, a service that re-enables urban travel that’s safe for everyone without costing the earth. Our mission is to create safe and convenient demand-responsive mobility services for European city-dwellers that are so attractive that no one feels they need to own a car.
And to do that, we’ll use shared electric, autonomous vehicles, in the hardest environment of all — our complex cities.
You may think that self-driving technology leadership is not being led in Europe and it’s true that most progress has been made in the US and more recently in China. But we are determined that we must do this here. And that’s because we Europeans have a very different perspective to both Americans and Chinese companies.
We know that any service must complement public transport and it’s got to be aligned to the city’s goals. We also know that it has to be inclusive and that we must cater for everyone.
And we recognise that our cities are really different to US cities, and to each other. Not just in topologies, objects, densities, markings, signage, lighting and so on, but in human behaviours. Helsinki is very different to, say, Naples.
But it’s also time for us Europeans to build a truly great deep technology company that is confident enough to learn from American examples. That means we must build the whole stack from deep technology to the consumer. It’s not going to be quick and it’s not going to be easy but we are confident that we can attract the capital and the talent we need and can build the customer acquisition capability to leverage it behind aligned goals.
Solving the perception, prediction, control, simulation and verification challenges for urban driving is the holy grail of autonomous vehicles today. No-one anywhere is quite ready.
But we do believe that within about four years — the same timespan we are looking at for these services to become legal to offer to consumers in some countries — we will be able to reach human driver levels of safety, and then to better them.
And to do that, we are finding and applying top scientific and engineering talent to solve the really hard technical challenges implicit in delivering safe autonomous shared electric transport services in Europe’s cities. In fact, Europe’s secret is its talent base, centred on our top universities, where the quality of research is at least as good as the US, and better in many cases. In our case, since we started hiring in the second half of 2016, more than 3,000 amazing people have applied to join us out of which we’ve chosen a team of more than 80 and we are well on our way to building the initial core capability of 250 within the next two years.
Delivering a truly safe solution relies on visual geometry, calibration, Bayesian inference, deep neural networks, reinforcement learning, game theoretics, control systems and state-of-the-art verification. It also relies on very sophisticated simulation of our cities, and the objects and behaviours within them, and on simulating sensors, vehicle dynamics, generating entire cities in fact. We are working on all these sciences, and our team is awesome — here’s just a few of them describing their work at Five AI.
Within a few weeks, we are going to emerge from proving grounds to start self-driving testing carefully on public roads in the UK. We will add many more capabilities over the next two years, increasing our training sets and ramping up our verification capability.
By the start of 2020 we’ll be ready to demonstrate a prototypical consumer service in London. It won’t be legal at that stage, but it’ll be pretty representative of how the service will work. It’s exciting stuff!
That’s just the first phase of our plan — building the core team and the core technology. There’s a lot to do beyond that with vehicle manufacturers, regulators, insurers, service providers and so on before we can really launch commercial services, but it’s definitely coming.
And long-term? That is about realising our goal: a future we can all participate in, with a city that functions, human potential that is realised and a planet whose resources we don’t squander.
It’s important work and we do it because we believe in building a world that we’ll be proud to hand on to our kids, and for them to hand to their kids. We have to believe that dream can become a reality.
- Stan Boland, CEO, FiveAI
