You Can Already Buy a Driverless Vehicle

While Google and other companies test their driverless cars while angling for governments to regulate them and consumers to demand them, one company dove headfirst into the market and is already selling a driverless "car" to businesses and universities.

To be fair, the vehicle, called the Navia, isn’t exactly a car—it’s more of a trolley or shuttle and looks a bit like an oversized golf cart. It’s made by a French company called Induct and is already operating at Oxford University, in city centers in Singapore, and in a couple small European cities such as Strasbourg, France.

The idea behind it is to solve the “first and last mile” problem (actually getting from home or work to a mass transit system) that many commuters have in cities. Unlike Google’s driverless cars, however, the Navia can’t even operate in manual mode—it doesn’t even have a steering wheel. Like other driverless cars, the Navia uses LIDAR and GPS to navigate autonomously.

“Our objective is to remove private cars from the center of cities. You can just jump in a Navia and it takes you where you want to go,” Pierre Lefevre, CEO of Induct, told me. “It can manage pedestrians and other vehicles and it can follow all of the normal street regulations.”

The all-electric Navia holds eight passengers and can go as fast as 28 mph, but it normally operates at about 12 mph in city centers. Obviously you’re not going to go on a road trip with one of these, but it’s easy to see its potential uses. Lefevre says the company has been in talks to sell Navias to hospitals, universities, amusement parks, and airports to serve as an automated shuttle.

It’s an early look at what many experts think will be the truly disruptive nature of driverless vehicle technology: carsharing. In the future, you’ll be able to call a car to come pick you up, have it drive you somewhere, and drop you off. It’ll then go shuttle someone else around, meaning the car isn’t useless while you’re doing your shopping or at a bar or something—it’s being used by someone else. Navia is the same. Customers can order the Navia to pick them up with a smartphone app and can tell it where to go. After it’s done, the Navia is free to go ferry someone else around.

Right now, service is free and open for anyone to use in the seven locations where it’s being operated, but Lefevre says the company is considering subscription and pay-as-you go services.

As you might expect, it’s not cheap: The Navia costs $250,000, which is a lot for a glorified golf cart. The company notes that it often costs more than that to run a bus or shuttle in a year (and that, because it’s electric, companies will eventually save money if they use the Navia), but buses and shuttles usually hold far more than eight people and can travel on highways and larger roads if necessary.

Induct obviously has much less to lose than Google if something goes awry—it’s much harder to injure someone going 12 mph in a small vehicle than it is in a full-fledged driverless car. But in any case, it’s exciting to see someone simply go for it with this technology.  The company has two vehicles out for demonstration purposes in California and one in Florida, so it might not be long until it gets approval to sell them in small city centers in the United States. It’s a baby step towards full integration of driverless cars, but at least it’s something.