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Driverless Car Startup Drive.ai Launching Ride-hailing Service in Texas
Drive.ai's deep tangerine autonomous vans are "intended to be visually distinct," according to Drive.ai co-founder and CEO Sameep Tandon.
Credit: Drive.ai
Drive.ai wants to be noticed. Unlike companies that have designed driverless cars to look a lot like regular ones, Drive.ai's autonomous vans are a deep tangerine with the words "self-driving vehicle" splashed across each side.
"It's intended to be visually distinct," Drive.ai co-founder and CEO Sameep Tandon said. (Before Drive.ai settled on orange, highlighter yellow was also a top contender.) "If you think of a school bus, you know when you're around a school bus, it's a really bad idea to say, harass it, or to do aggressive maneuvers around it," he said. "The first thing we want to do is make it very, very visibly distinct, so that your expectations around the vehicle also click."
Those vans will soon become the first driverless vehicles to pick up passengers in the state of Texas. In July, Drive.ai, a Mountain View, California-based startup, plans to launch a six-month pilot program in Frisco, a small city in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.
The Frisco pilot will use the Nissan NV200, the same boxy van that roams New York City streets as a yellow taxi. Drive.ai is starting small with just four vehicles that will operate during weekday daylight hours, serving an office park complex where about 10,000 people work. Much like hailing an Uber, riders will summon one of Drive.ai's vehicles using an app they install on their phones. For now, rides are free.
From Quartz
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