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OXFORD, England (Reuters) – Away from the vast, sunny streets of Phoenix, where Waymo's autonomous taxis practice their craft, a handful of European startups are developing driverless cars to navigate the clogged, chaotic, rain-swept roads of the world. European cities. .
Startups such as Oxbotica, FiveAI and Wayve, who test cars in Britain, believe that the old continent is a unique proposition with quirks and challenges that the tech giant Alphabet (GOOGL.O) Waymo, Uber (UBER.N), Aurora and others have not cracked yet.
European start-ups said they needed to be creative and focus on cheaper, better-suited technologies that could cope with heavy rain on a busy London street.
"A car trained to drive on Arizona's open highways will not survive in the streets of Croydon. It's a totally different environment, "said Alex van Someren, a venture capital investor with Amadeus Capital, a shareholder of FiveAI.
Startups hope that by developing systems and software that work in the toughest conditions, they will find themselves in a prime position when large, US-based companies move into new regions to take advantage of the future of autonomous cars. .
According to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the era of connected high-tech vehicles is expected to generate about $ 150 billion in new profits for the automotive sector by 2035, making the technology race a potentially lucrative business.
Some investors estimate that one-fifth of global new car sales will be self-driving vehicles by 2030.
Although only a few start-ups can survive, investors have invested $ 70 billion in private investments since 2014 in more than 3,400 companies involved in the "new mobility" world, ranging from autonomous driving to Helicopter going through electric scooters and machine learning. BCG.
ON A SHOES
In the English university city of Oxford, Paul Newman founded Oxbotica robotics and autonomous driving company in order to develop a software of "universal autonomy" that can be sold to any car manufacturer, fleet operator, company transport or transport company.
The company is testing its software in a Ford Mondeo with matching cameras and sensors in the busy streets of the city, running the same loop in the main street and in front of the Red Lion pub, five times a day for three months.
The repeated repetition of different circuits with its fleet of cars gives the company a baseline to measure its progress and, in difficult areas, it allows the software to generate new data relevant to a specific location, said Newman.
"Negotiations with cyclists and undergraduate students early in the morning – on pony streets – in European cities are a bit different," he said.
The company is now planning to open offices in North America and China, and launch an autonomous taxi service in 2021 in London on specific routes – in the presence of a security driver – in the part of a consortium working with the taxi company Addison Lee.
Oxbotica's public road tests are very expensive and expensive, and demonstrate the scale of the challenge faced by companies that want to take Waymo and Uber cheaply.
Like Wayve and FiveAI, Oxbotica is content with a fraction of the funding allocated in the United States to futuristic transportation companies. It received funding of 22.6 million pounds ($ 28 million), while FiveAI raised $ 37.7 million, according to the latest Crunchbase figures.
In comparison, General Motors' (GM.NCruise's self-driving division raised $ 1.15 billion in new equity, valuing the unit at $ 19 billion, while California-based driverless start-up startup, Nuro, raised $ 940 million dollars in February.
The amount of venture capital funds invested in autonomous automotive and technology companies in Europe has doubled in 2018, but it still represents only a tiny fraction of the amount injected into US startups. European companies raised $ 89 million last year, or only 2% of venture capital funding collected by US companies, according to data from CB Insights. tmsnrt.rs/2FN5AkZ
RAIN STOPS PLAY
US start-ups can benefit from generous funding, but Europeans argue that the gaping funding gap, coupled with specific regional needs, has driven them to find cheaper ways to fill technology gaps.
Lidar, for example, the laser pulse technology widely used in American autonomous cars, struggles to paint an accurate picture of the vehicle environment once the rain, fog or snow set in place. European developers are testing a range of tools.
"The challenges we face here are slightly different and this requires a different set of sensors … and more emphasis on the processing of images and videos and the use of visualization techniques", said Stan Boland, founder and CEO of FiveAI.
"The deterioration of lidar in the rain is pretty horrible," said Boland.
FiveAI has started this year road tests in the London boroughs of Bromley and Croydon and hopes to launch pbadenger tests in 2020. Its long-term goal is to operate a fleet of autonomous vehicles in addition to public transit .
Newman and Boland, of Oxbotica, say that lidar has a role to play alongside other sensors and cameras, but Wayve, a Cambridge-based autonomous driving company, insists that laser technology is useless.
Lidar startups vying for supremacy: tmsnrt.rs/2EAsKuC
Wayve co-founder Amar Shah said recent improvements meant you could now get reliable relative depth estimates using only cameras, which would be much cheaper and more reliable for mbad production of autonomous cars.
He added that Wayve would soon seek partnerships with automakers, suppliers and other organizations, such as regulators, involved in the development of a driverless future. He also dismissed the idea that companies such as Waymo and Cruise would pose a serious threat with their greater financial weight.
"They've spent ten years in Phoenix, Arizona, and can barely get out, so how can they come to Europe?" Shah said.
"WINTER AUTONOMY"
Nevertheless, badysts and consultants paint a future dominated by companies such as Uber and Waymo with gigantic fleets offering cheap monthly subscriptions for stand-alone vehicles on demand. But total autonomy could still be in years.
"From the first idea that it would happen quite quickly, the winter of autonomy has now come," said Arthur Kipferler, a partner at Berylls Strategy Advisors, an automotive consulting firm.
The challenges facing the technology were brought to light when a pedestrian was killed in March 2018 by an autonomous car tested by Uber. The incident temporarily interrupted Uber's development program.
"When you get on the ground and test yourself in autonomous vehicles, whether in San Francisco or China, in complex and unusual urban environments, it's still difficult to get full autonomy," he says. Deborah Orida, Global Head of Active Equities at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, who has invested in stand-alone startups, Aurora and Zoox.
For European start-ups, investor mistrust of the promise of a single autonomy could be an opportunity to get their message across.
But while they may see autonomous driving as a fundamentally regional challenge, others criticize their localized approach, saying the US giants will prevail by first ensuring commercially viable services.
"If you want a business, I think you have to go where it's easy, do it fast enough, then move up a gear, learn and move to the higher difficulty level," said Berylls' Kipferler.
"If you're on the research side, test it in central London, Mumbai or Delhi – and you'll never have a commercial department, but you'll have research."
Helen Reid and Eric Onstad; edited by David Clarke
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