Voyage (Udacity Spinoff) Testing Self-Driving Vehicles In San Jose Retirement Community
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The self-driving vehicle tech firm Voyage, which spun off from Udacity earlier in 2017, has begun testing autonomous cars in a San Jose retirement community, according to recent reports.
The Villages, San Jose from Voyage on Vimeo.
As that testing is going well, the company is now looking to further expand the trial. Work to date has utilized modified Ford Fusions outfitted with self-driving software and extra sensors — including LiDAR and radar systems.
To date, the testing at Villages Golf and Country Club in California has occurred on just 15 miles of roadway — roadway. Though, that’s shared with other cars, golf carts, pedestrians, and dogs, amongst other things. The maximum speed limit on these roads, it should realized, is just 25 miles per hour.
“And though the roads are used like public ones, they’re private, which gives Voyage leeway in terms of how much information about its testing it has to disclose to public entities and regulators,” Tech Crunch reports.
“Voyage also thinks retirement communities are a good target audience in terms of AV use: seniors who no longer drive themselves stand to benefit a lot from being able to regain independence through the use of self-driving ride-hailing services and on-demand transportation.”
Interestingly, Voyage reportedly had to pay double for insurance in order to get the pilot going. Perhaps more interestingly, though, it also had to agree to hand over anonymized data to the insurance company.
For more background information on Voyage and Udacity, see “New Self-Driving Taxi Startup Dubbed “Voyage” Launched By Udacity” or click on those links above to visit their websites.
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