On Monday, Japan’s TDK Corporation announced that its disruptive technologies venture capital arm, TDK Ventures, has invested in San Francisco-based driverless transportation startup Faction. TDK Ventures says its investment is aimed at expediting the development of a low-cost sustainable solution to urban delivery and travel-on-demand markets.
The size and other terms of the investment were not made public.
Faction’s driverless model is built on a three-wheel autocycle electric vehicle (EV) platform. The company is a recent graduate of the Y Combinator business incubator, having previously launched driverless vehicles ranging from light EVs to full size semi-trucks.
TDK notes that despite significant progress over the past decade, completely autonomous vehicles remain elusive. Current artificial intelligence software and machine learning algorithms can handle close to 90 percent of driving scenarios (even more under typical highway conditions). However, the edge cases are still years away from completely turning over the wheel to autonomous technology. Faction says it aims to fill that gap with its TeleAssist framework, which adapts autonomous technology with supplemental human in the loop supervision so that driverless vehicles can be immediately road-ready, as opposed to 5 or 10 years in the future.
TDK Ventures says it sees the new partnership with Faction as an ideal match in both vision and technology.
“A key part of our mission is to progress technology which furthers digital, energy, and environmental transformation,” said Nicolas Sauvage, TDK Ventures President. “Faction addresses all three in an integrated way that can immediately improve society. They bring a digital approach to a problem in both the energy and sustainability space. We want to bring our own TDK Goodness to the table to expedite their development and see their vision to fruition as quickly as possible.”
Additionally, Faction has differentiated itself by building entirely new driverless EV cars, rather than converting standard vehicles to autonomous technology. This approach, it says, afford an opportunity to optimize and showcase the strengths of the technology, rather than limited by the constraints of retrofitting legacy vehicles.
“Most autonomous projects are taking existing vehicles and trying to retrofit them for driverless technologies,” said Faction CEO Ain McKendrick. “Rather than do the same things over and over again, we took a clean sheet approach from the chassis up.”
Faction designed its EV system using a three-wheel autocycle platform, which is regulated in the same class as motorcycles, stripping significant load demands from the electric power system. By “right-sizing” in this way, Faction says its EV fleet can navigate urban landscapes and provide environmental and energy sustainability benefits, at a consumer price of less than $30,000 per unit. This, it says, is key in a U.S. market where 90 percent of urban trips consist of one passenger traveling fewer than five miles. In this landscape, Faction says, using large legacy vehicles is not sustainable from an emissions, gridlock, and energy use perspective.
Initially, Faction wants to position its technology in the micro-logistics market, with a price point low enough to undercut ride sharing and delivery competitors.
