Robotaxis drive miles just to get cleaned and charged; this new startup wants to fix that
Take a stroll around San Francisco and it won’t take long to spot an empty autonomous vehicle cruising the city’s streets, waiting to be hailed by a rider or heading off to a distant depot to be charged and cleaned.
Take a stroll around San Francisco and it won’t take long to spot an empty autonomous vehicle cruising the city’s streets, waiting to be hailed by a rider or heading off to a distant depot to be charged and cleaned.
The short version
- These deadhead miles — an industry term for miles driven without a paying passenger — are one of the biggest barriers between robotaxi companies and profitability.
- Redwood City, California-based startup Aseon Labs thinks it has a fix: parking space-sized automated pods that can be scattered throughout cities to inspect, clean, and charge robotaxis.
- The company, co-founded by the team behind battery-swapping startup Pushme, calls them robotic pit stops for the robotaxi industry.
- And the idea has caught the attention of investors.
What happened
Aseon Labs has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners, TechCrunch has learned. The seed funds will be used to build five prototypes of these pods, grow its six-person robotics and engineering team to about a dozen, and secure the real estate needed to build out its network, according to Aseon Labs co-founder and CEO George Kalligeros.
Why it matters
“In order to reach economic parity with ride-hailing — which is where we need to get with self-driving cars — and to stop really subsidizing the cost, you need the utilization to go up,” Kalligeros told TechCrunch.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at TechCrunch via the links above and below.