Drive.ai

» see drive.ai as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Drive.ai was founded in 2015 by a group out of Andrew Ng's artificial intelligence lab at Stanford, at the exact moment when the phrase "deep learning" started attracting venture money on its own. The technical position was that the perception stack should be learned end to end rather than hand-engineered rule by rule, which in 2015 was a real argument and not the settled default it later became. It came out of stealth in August 2016 with twelve million dollars, took fifty million more from New Enterprise Associates in June 2017 and another fifteen million that September with Grab participating.

Where it differed from the rest of the field was what it did with the money. Waymo and Cruise were building toward a general robotaxi that could go anywhere, a problem with no visible finish line. Drive.ai picked fixed routes in specific suburbs and put paying passengers in the seats, which is a much smaller claim and a much easier one to actually deliver.

In May 2018 it opened a pilot in Frisco, Texas, running a set route through an office and retail district. In October it added Arlington, with three vehicles covering an entertainment district that includes AT&T Stadium. For a period it was described as the only company in the sector earning revenue from self-driving rides, which says less about Drive.ai than about how little anyone else had shipped.

This is one of the few graves here that sits next to my day job rather than my childhood. I work on computer vision for unmanned aircraft, which is a different vehicle class with a different failure mode, but the underlying problem is the same one: a model reading a camera feed, and a decision that has to be made before the next frame arrives. Watching a company with better funding than mine will ever see get four years and then run out is a specific kind of instructive.

~ the case file ~

~ the screens on the outside ~

The orange paint was a design decision and so was everything bolted to it. Nissan NV200 vans in a color chosen to be impossible to miss, with LED panels on all four sides that displayed text to whoever was outside the vehicle. "Waiting for you to cross." "Passengers entering."

Drive.ai had identified something the rest of the industry was ignoring, which is that a driverless car breaks a negotiation people conduct dozens of times a day without noticing. You catch the driver's eye at a crosswalk and you both know what happens next. Remove the driver and the pedestrian is left reading a windshield. The screens were an attempt to give the machine a face, and every serious external-communication effort since has been working from the same problem statement.

~ frisco and arlington ~

Both Texas deployments had safety operators aboard for most of their run and covered routes measured in a few miles. That is easy to write off as a demo, and it also meant ordinary residents rode in a self-driving vehicle in 2018, in suburban Texas, for free, on their commute, which is a different thing from a press event on a closed track.

~ the last two weeks ~

The WARN notice went in on 12 June 2019, listing ninety employees at Mountain View and giving a closure date at the end of that week. The company had raised seventy-seven million dollars and was last valued at two hundred million in 2017, and the round that would have carried it further never closed.

Apple confirmed the acquisition on 25 June, characterized as an acqui-hire for its Project Titan group, with at least five engineers moving across and the vehicles and the routes going nowhere. Frisco and Arlington lost their shuttles. Four years later the field had consolidated so hard that Argo AI was closed by its own investors and GM shut down Cruise, which puts Drive.ai's ending in a less unusual light than it looked at the time.

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