FiveAI CEO Stan Boland on winning the driverless car race in Europe

FiveAI car on the road in London.
FiveAI

• Driverless car startup FiveAI is sending out bright
  blue cars to gather information about London’s roads this
  week.
• The cars will be driven by humans, but FiveAI CEO Stan
  Boland said the company is preparing for its first driverless
  test on public roads before the end of 2018.
• FiveAI wants bring a shared driverless taxi service to
  London by next year, and beat Uber and Waymo with the
  technology in Europe.
• The company has a small amount of funding compared to
  bigger US firms, but is confident its autonomous tech will
  navigate “difficult” European cities better than the
  competition.

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Anyone walking around the South London suburbs of Bromley and
Croydon this week might spot a bright new addition to the roads:
A futuristic sky-blue Ford Fusion laden with sensors.

FiveAI, a British driverless car startup, is putting five of
these vehicles on UK roads to gather data to train its autonomous
vehicles. The cars will collect information for the next 10
months to understand real-world road layouts, traffic flow, and
the behaviour of other road users.

Part of the reason the cars look so lurid is so that the public
knows who’s gathering data. FiveAI said it is gathering
information in a way that is compliant with Europe’s strict
privacy regulation, the GDPR, and no individual would be
identifiable from the images it captures through its cameras.

FiveAI

While these cars will be driven by humans at all times, the
training data they gather will eventually inform FiveAI’s efforts
to bring shared, driverless taxis to London in 2019. The company
said in May that it will begin
trialling driverless cars on public roads before the end of
2018.

FiveAI has raised $18 million to become Europe’s major
driverless car startup

FiveAI

FiveAI hopes to be Europe’s answer to Uber or Google’s driverless
car efforts, and wants to create a shared, autonomous taxi
service in the UK before it is beaten by a rich American or
Chinese firm.

It has raised $18 million (£14 million) in Series A funding to
date, but has to fend off behemoths that are worth billions of
dollars. Uber has raised more than $1 billion and is the most
valuable startup in the world. Google is sitting on around $100
billion in cash.

Stan Boland, FiveAI’s chief executive, has a historian’s theory
on why it can beat foreign competition.

“If I were [US companies] Waymo, Uber or Aurora… and I was
trying to solve the problem of safer driving, I would choose to
do it somewhere where it’s an easier problem,” he said.

“In Europe, our cities are medieval and complicated, density is
much higher, human behaviours are different. Our cities were
built from villages… I think a European city is much harder
than a US city.”

Google Waymo’s driverless
car.
Waymo

In other words, Google’s driverless car tech might find it easier
to learn in the expanses of the Nevada desert than it would in
windy London roads, originally designed for driving cattle.

Still, he acknowledged that “Europe is late” and puts this down
to two reasons: US companies benefited from research pioneered by
DARPA, America’s military research agency, and because it has
never been in the European car industry’s interest to upend its
existing business model. “Europe has been a bit asleep at the
wheel,” Boland said.

He said it’s important that European governments recognise this
and clear a path for local companies, rather than being “dazzled”
by similar offerings from Silicon Valley giants. “It’s very easy
for governments to be pushed around by big companies and to be
dazzled by [for example] Google’s first step… It’s quite
important we recognise the fact we need to build some big
companies out of Europe,” he explained.

How FiveAI’s driverless cars work

While FiveAI’s sky-blue cars are cruising around London’s streets
gathering data, their autonomous counterparts are still being
fine-tuned at a testing ground north of London. The goal is to
build a fully fledged driverless car system that can be
integrated into different vehicles — perhaps with an eye to
licensing that technology out to carmakers.

Boland said in May that FiveAI
would be ready to conduct a public trial of its driverless cars
later this year. Like other driverless car projects, FiveAI’s
autonomous vehicles rely on being able to “see” and understand
what is around them, and react accordingly.

FiveAI’s system is a little different from that being tested out
by Google. It is aiming to create a software and hardware stack
that would allow vehicles to navigate complex environments with
simple maps, rather than highly detailed, precise 3D maps.

Laser
detectors on an Apple self-driving car.

MacCallister
Higgins

That requires a huge number of sensors and computing power,
Boland told Business Insider.

The company has fitted eight Ford Fusions with a large number of
sensors, and is testing them out at Millbrook Proving Ground in
Bedfordshire.

Those sensors comprise 14 cameras, three laser detectors, six
radars, a GPS, and the additional computing power. There is so
much computing power that the hardware is not only housed in a
roofbox, but under the bumper and in the trunk. There’s also
100kg of battery in the car, Boland said.

The cameras, organised in stereo pairs, do the “seeing”,
processing raw data feeds and using these to build up an image of
their surroundings, and to identify individual objects. Then a
deep neural network tries to make sense of the objects in the
picture in real time. Even accounting for delays in processing,
Boland said, the system “thinks” faster than a human.

“It should be possible for us to build a system that is at least
as safe as a human, hopefully safer,” he said.

Investors are confident in FiveAI

Though FiveAI’s funding is small, Boland said investors are
confident.

He described FiveAI’s fundraising process last year: “Quite often
after half an hour, investors would say ‘I should probably do
this, will you please let me write a cheque?’, and so we could
have raised about $100 million last summer when we were raising
our Series A but we only raised $18 million.”

Boland
has previously said publicly that FiveAI has raised a modest
sum because it’s still building its tech platform. FiveAI will
need the big capital raise in future when it wants to buy lots of
cars to load its system onto. That may be some point after 2021,
according to his previous comments.

Part of the reason for investors wanting to throw money at FiveAI
is because Stan Boland is who he is.

John Lusty, the former
Oculus engineer who joined FiveAI this year.
FiveAI

Dharmash Mistry, a partner at FiveAI’s latest lead investor
Lakestar, pointed to Boland’s history as a UK tech veteran.
Boland was once chief executive of iconic British computing
company Acorn Computers, and also founded and sold wireless
technology firm Icera to Nvidia. Acorn was cofounded by Hermann
Hauser, director at another FiveAI investor, Amadeus Capital
Partners.

“He’s able to recruit super talent because of who he is,” Mistry
said. Boland managed to
poach a senior engineer from Facebook’s Oculus division to
run FiveAI’s simulation team in London. “You’re pulling people
out of very well-paid jobs, the £200,000 jobs that the Facebooks,
Googles, and others offer.”