Cavnue, the company building the future of roads, kicks into high gear.
The SIP-founded tech company is expanding its reach far beyond the Motor City
Cavnue, which announced its flagship project in Detroit last summer, continues to grow, adding industry-leading talent from Silicon Valley and Washington, and winning a major deal with the Maryland Department of Transportation, the start of a larger partnership with the global toll road operator and developer Transurban.
Joining Cavnue: Top Leaders in the Future of Mobility
Cavnue has added four visionary experts — Jaime Waydo, Nicole Nason, Dave Clifford, and Dino Nardicchio — to its stellar roster of leaders, including Tyler Duvall, Cavnue’s CEO and a former top DOT official.
Jaime Waydo, one of the nation’s most innovative and respected system engineers, is joining the company as Chief Technology Officer. As the leader of Cavnue’s technology and engineering teams, she will build the technology to bring Cavnue’s vision to life. And Jamie knows how to build: a renowned engineer with decades of experience in automation and robotics, she comes to Cavnue from Apple, where she led engineering for its Special Projects Group. We at SIP have been admirers of her work since her days at Waymo, where she led systems engineering and oversaw Waymo’s first deployment. And if all that weren’t enough, Jaime began her career with thirteen years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she was the Lead Mobility Mechanical Engineer on the Mars Rover. We have the highest hopes for her next earth-bound project.
As Jaime builds the technology to power the connected, autonomous roads of the future, Nicole Nason, the new Chief Safety Officer and Head of External Affairs of Cavnue, will ensure safety remains paramount. Nicole knows safety: She comes to us after serving as the 26th Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration. In addition to overseeing the management of the nation’s highways from 2019 to 2021, her long career in public service includes leading vehicle safety as the Administration of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2006 to 2008 and serving as a top State Department official.
Alongside Jaime and Nicole, Dave Clifford has joined Cavnue as Head of Strategic Innovation. Dave was most recently the Chief Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Scientist at General Motors, and at Cavnue, he’ll envision ways for our technology stack to drive innovations in road operations, procurement, and contracting.
Rounding out the team of new hires is Dino Nardicchio, who will serve as the Head of Automotive and Autonomous Vehicle Partnerships. He’ll work with Cavnue’s OEM Advisory Committee, which includes Ford, GM, Toyota, Waymo, Honda, and BMW, among others, to ensure Cavnue’s interoperability with new advanced driving systems in the latest vehicles.
Next stop: Maryland. Cavnue to be Digital Innovation Partner for $9B P3
When Cavnue announced the Michigan autonomous laneway project last year, we shared our conviction that Cavnue’s technology stack will have broad national applications.
That conviction is now playing out in Maryland, where the state Department of Transportation has selected the Accelerate Maryland consortium, with Cavnue as the Digital Innovation Partner, to develop a 70-mile managed lane to relieve traffic on the I-495 and I-270. The project, estimated to cost over $9B, will be the largest public-private road project in North America.
Cavnue, as part of the consortium with Transurban, Macquarie, and others, responded to the RFP seeking a “shockingly innovative” proposal — and that’s what Cavnue does best. Cavnue will use its technology stack to create a real-time digital twin of the road to enable safer operation and greater throughput. An autonomous lane on the I-495 won’t appear overnight, but the necessary infrastructure will be embedded in a way that future-proofs the taxpayer’s investment and activates autonomous operation once compatible vehicles are widespread.
The Maryland project will become the most advanced roadway in America outside of Michigan — a road that communicates to vehicle information systems and enables predictive accident management.
And the project marks the beginning of a larger partnership between Cavnue and Transurban, the world’s leading owner and operator of toll roads.
Cavnue projects highlighted in Senate infrastructure hearing
At its inaugural “Building Back Better” hearing, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works heard testimony from Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan — one a Democrat, the other a Republican — who each featured their states’ Cavnue projects as examples of innovative infrastructure. Emphasizing the need for “a national vision” for a clean, equitable transportation future, Whitmer referenced Michigan’s development of a “40-mile driverless vehicle lane between Detroit and Ann Arbor” as one of its “incredible assets.” And Hogan called attention to “the largest P3 highway project in the world to relieve traffic congestion on I-270 and I-495.”
It’s only the beginning
Cavnue’s ability to attract proven leaders and its track record of being recognized by policymakers as the ideal innovation partner point to a bright future for the company and its technology. These early wins for autonomous laneways will accelerate use cases for autonomous trucking, agile lanes, and next-generation road-use charging — and they will improve the future of American transportation for decades to come.
