How May Mobility’s autonomous shuttle ambitions backfired Posted on : Jul 06 - 2020

By all appearances, May Mobility was a scrappy success story. The autonomous transportation startup made its debut at Y Combinator’s demo day in 2017, with a team that had been working on driverless tech since the third U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge in 2017. Within the span of a few years, May had a roster of paying customers in Michigan, Ohio, and Rhode Island as it raised tens of millions in venture capital from investors including Toyota and BMW.

But on the inside looking out, it was a different story. May engineers struggled to maintain and upgrade the company’s vehicle platform, at one point spending months attempting to install an air conditioning system in the depths of summer. The leadership’s ambition often outstretched May’s ability to deliver, which upset vendors, some of whom went unpaid for stretches. And not a single one of the company’s commercial routes approached full autonomy.

Conversations with former May employees reveal a startup struggling to stand out in an industry dominated by incumbents like Waymo, Uber, Aurora, Cruise, and Amazon’s Zoox. As one source put it, May’s intent might not have been malicious — executives at the top were convinced it would succeed. But overeagerness and inexperience led to missteps that soured municipal relationships.

Auspicious beginnings

May Mobility was cofounded by Edwin Olson, who previously acted as lead investigator on Ford’s driverless car program and co-directed autonomous driving projects at the Toyota Research Institute, Toyota’s mobility- and robotics-focused R&D division. An associate professor of computer science, Olson assumed the role of CEO at May after taking leave from the University of Michigan, joining GM Ventures veteran Alisyn Malek, May’s COO.

Malek, like Olson, came from the autonomous car industry. At GM Ventures, she oversaw the relationship with then-startup Cruise, which is now developing GM’s driverless car platform. Steve Vozar, May’s other cofounder and chief technical officer, was also a member of Ford’s driverless vehicle program and directed the University of Michigan’s APRIL robotics laboratory.

From the start, May’s aim was to deploy implementations of autonomous driving technology in the real world, with an emphasis on what’s possible today as opposed to 5 or 10 years into the future. In alignment with that goal, the company targeted customers with fixed-route transportation needs in geofenced, easily mappable business districts, campuses, and closed residential communities.

“We’ve seen the Ford, Toyota, and GM experiences up close,” Olson told TechCrunch in an August 2017 interview. “Like the other big companies in this space … they’re all after the transportation market as a whole. This is the $4 trillion problem of transportation on demand, think autonomous Uber. [W]e think that by getting out into the real world, we can not only build a successful business, but we can turn on a flow of data and operational know-how that will help us move and improve our systems faster than the [original equipment manufacturers] which are in R&D mode.”

May chose not to design vehicles itself but instead focused on software, low-level electromechanical systems, and sensors while sourcing and building upon third-party hardware. Its “secret sauce” was ostensibly a set of algorithms the company called Multi-Policy Decision Making, work on which began in Olson’s lab. Instead of training the system by feeding it data representing many different scenarios and teaching it to react to those scenarios, May’s software was designed to understand situations and predict what’s happening on an agent-by-agent basis. View More