Voyage — How to build a Self-Driving Car Startup
By: Jeremy Cohen
Tags: Autonomous Cars, Machine Learning, Self Driving Cars, Startup, Deep Learning

How it started

When Udacity built its self-driving car Nanodegree program, they wanted to build an actual self-driving car. It took them 6 months to build a vehicle that would drive autonomously in the El Camino Road for 32 miles in San Francisco.

By the time on the success of testing the self-driving car, the team have developed an in-depth knowledge of the self-driving car. It is in 2017 when they finally decided to build their venture on a self-driving car…Voyage.

Voyage Approach to Self-Driving Cars

Voyage, similar to most self-driving car startups, aims to make the roads safer by making autonomous driving mainstream.

The problem: How to build a self-driving car company and not die in the middle?

In 2017, building self-driving cars in San Francisco became a competitive market. Google and Tesla were already on the roads dominating, and other startups stopped after a few months due to funding issues.

So when Voyage’s team quit Udacity to build their startup, a question immediately raised: How to build a thriving company and not perish like the others?

The solution came quite soon: Don’t directly compete.

Building a self-driving vehicle is hard enough, why making it harder by competing against Google?

Waymo (Google) is focusing on hard problems like driving everywhere autonomously (level 5). In autonomous driving, it can be quite easy to drive on the highway, and quite hard to drive in the middle of New York City. When building a company, you get to choose where you’ll work.

Voyage decided to focus on driving in easier and quieter places — Places where no one is in a hurry, and where people have poor access to transportation.

👉 That’s how the idea of retirement communities came.

The needs of the retirement communities are a much easier problem to solve, with no competition, as you can see in the top right quadrant.

Building self-driving cars for the retirement communities is:

Slow — the speed is often reduced to a maximum of 25 km/h.

Calm — there are much fewer pedestrians and cars.

Clear — the path is mostly straight lines

Still Challenging — Retirement communities are made of people who could potentially refuse the self-driving car idea.

Another great advantage is that they’re self-contained.

Convince the person running the community that self-driving cars will be a good thing, and you can do your test there. Most starting companies drive in parking lots; Voyage could drive in the city. This has a final big advantage: you can have exclusivity. It means no competition, at all.

Don’t tread lightly on this “retirement community” idea.

People from the retirement communities have poor transportation systems installed, and most deliberately use their cars even though they shouldn’t… by lack of an alternative.

We built the MILLA Pod around the same idea a few years ago: Some cities don’t have transportation systems, and a self-driving car is the perfect solution.

👉 If you ever want to build a self-driving car startup, just open your eyes, and you’ll be able to avoid most of the competition, fighting for the same piece of meat. Take this 10%… and you’ll make a fortune!

What’s a fortune?

Here’s what Voyage identifies for their market.

It might be hard to realize the potential.

Let’s take a smaller scale: their first community named The Villages in Florida. This community has 125,000 residents, 750 miles of road, and it means a potentially addressable market of 700M$. Residents there have a buying power of 10.6 B$.

In other words — that tiny percentage no one wants is still a lot of money!