INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
We are still years away from a time when fully-autonomous cars will be able to drive us from A to B, and the complexity of getting to that
point is likely going to need hundreds of billions of dollars of investment before it becomes a reality.That hard truth is leading to some
shifts in the self-driving startup landscape
designing its own fully self-driving cars, and then running fleets of them in its own transportation service
backing from Trustbridge Partners, insurance giant Direct Line Group and Sistema VC, as well as previous investors Lakestar, Amadeus Capital
Partners, Kindred Capital and Notion Capital
The high-profile startup, founded by a team that had previously built and sold several chip companies to the likes of Broadcom, Nvidia and
Huawei, had been the leading partner for a big government-backed pilot project, StreetWise, to test and work on autonomous driving systems
across boroughs in London
October after initially getting announced in 2018.Five might continue to work on research projects like these, Boland said, but the primary
business aim for the company will no longer be ultimately to build cars for themselves, but to work on tech that will be sold either to
also a participant in the StreetWise project, could use testing and measurement to determine risk and pricing for insurance packages for
Motor Insurance at Direct Line Group, in a statement
need to be addressed in bringing safe self-driving to market
Insurers will need to build the capability to measure and underwrite new types of risk
Indeed, there have been some significant casualties in the meantime, including Drive.AI (which Apple acquired after it ran out of
self-driving cars, and the tech underpinning it, was because of the complexity behind building localised systems: a big US or Asian company
Added to that, Five firmly believed the economics of building and operating these cars would prove to be too high for wide-scale private
Hence, the strategy (one adopted by many in the autonomous space) of building the technology for fleets, where transportation businesses,
not individuals, would own the cars and recoup their investments by charging private individuals for rides.Yet while it may have been easy
The B2C model needs billions [of investment], but others are finding their niche as great providers of technology needed to deliver the
Its testing and measuring tools point to one of the toughest challenges among these: how to assure that the deep learning software a company
requirement to essentially build from the ground up computer systems that behave as well as (or ideally better) than multitasking humans
behind the wheel; but the consequence of doing that wrong is not just a strange string of words, or some other kind of non sequitur, but
No surprise that there appears still a very long way to go before we see anything like Level 5 systems in action, but in the meantime,
investors are willing to continue placing their bets
Partly because of how advanced it got with its car project on relatively little funding, Five remains an interesting company to investors,
novel solutions that move the needle for the whole industry
deliver safe self-driving
