New Self-Driving Taxi Startup Dubbed “Voyage” Launched By Udacity

Another interesting self-driving taxi/vehicle startup has unveiled itself in recent days. This one seems to be quite serious, considering the people behind it, including former Udacity Vice President Oliver Cameron.

The new startup is reportedly aiming to begin delivering fully functional autonomous taxis to “real users” in under 5 years. This puts the startup’s timeline behind those of GM/Lyft, Ford, Mercedes/Bosch, and some others, but it still seems pretty ambitious. The startup will reportedly begin testing with passengers “very soon,” whatever that means.

The startup’s CEO kicked things off with this tweet:

https://twitter.com/olivercameron/status/849695564220452864?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.engadget.com%2F2017%2F04%2F06%2Fvoyage-udacity-autonomous-taxis-coming-soon%2F

Engadget provides more: “Popular online learning service Udacity already trains engineers for work in the fast-growing autonomous vehicles field, but now the company is ready to harness all that talent and launch its own self-driving taxi company… As Cameron noted on Twitter, he thinks Voyage can hit that goal thanks to a ‘maturing’ ecosystem that will allow the company to add autonomous functions to existing vehicles without needing to build a new self-driving car from the ground up. According to Business Insider, Voyage plans to differentiate itself from the competition at Uber and Lyft by allowing riders to control the experience with voice commands that set destination, add additional stops or simply control music playback.”

Notably, Udacity will remain completely separate from Voyage, and the startup won’t be using any of the self-driving tech developed by Udacity students, for legal reasons, reportedly.