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From Trucks to Taxis Unlocking Driverless Mobility
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00:02Hello everybody, my name is Raphael, I'm an investment director at Euraseo, I'm here on stage with Thomas, the co
00:10-founder and CEO of Vey, hello Thomas.
00:13Hi everyone, very nice to meet you.
00:15We are first going to watch a short video about what Vey is doing.
00:49Okay, so Thomas, thank you for being here and coming to Paris.
00:54We are really here to celebrate three major milestones achievements that Vey has accomplished in the last month.
01:04I mean the first one is that Vey is the first company to have a fully driverless car on the
01:13road without safety driver in Europe.
01:14And so this is in Hamburg, Germany.
01:16The second biggest achievement is that you've launched a commercial service in the US with no safety driver in the
01:26car.
01:27And so the third milestone that we are here to celebrate today is that you are here today with Peugeot,
01:34the French brand of the Stellantis subsidiary in Vivitech to celebrate a great strategic partnership with them.
01:42So I think we are going to speak about all of that during this session.
01:47But first, Thomas, if you can maybe introduce yourself and introduce Vey as a company.
01:53Of course, thanks for these very nice words.
01:56Very glad to be here in Paris.
01:58I'm Thomas, I'm one of the three co-founders and the CEO of Vey.
02:03I'm originally German, my background is in computer science and product.
02:07I studied that at Stanford.
02:09This is the third company that I started.
02:11And then I spent about six years in the Bay Area building fully self-driving cars.
02:17Back then it was always like it's going to be there in three years, it's going to be there in
02:20three years.
02:21So about six years ago, together with one of my co-founders who also built self-driving shuttles,
02:27we actually returned to Europe and started to build a complete contrarian approach to autonomous driving,
02:32which we call tele-driving.
02:35And yeah, with that we moved back to Europe and we're headquartered in Berlin.
02:40We have offices in Hamburg and now in Las Vegas.
02:43We're about 140 people and yeah, we've raised a total of $110 million in venture capital.
02:50And yeah, very excited to talk about tele-driving, but also talk about autonomous driving as a whole
02:56because that's also where I spent many years in.
02:59Okay.
03:00So Thomas, can you explain a bit like what is tele-driving?
03:03Because I don't know if everybody in the room like really understands like what you're building
03:07and how unique is the tele-driving technology that you've built.
03:12Yeah, I'm very happy to do so.
03:13So we build technology.
03:16It's, I would say it's one of these technologies.
03:19Everyone is like autonomous driving, autonomous driving.
03:22And we've been now for six years building tele-driving that I think is still a bit on the, you
03:27know,
03:28on the back burner of people's attention to see what really of good things remote driving can do in any
03:34kind of industries.
03:35And how the technology works is you've seen some of them or, you know, the technology live in action in
03:41the video is where a remote driver,
03:44which we call the tele-driver, remotely drives a vehicle, right?
03:47So the tele-driver sees just as well as being in the car, maybe even better because they have the
03:54surround view around the car with no blind spots.
03:57They hear through audio emergency vehicles and, you know, just like as you're in the car or maybe even better
04:04because you can,
04:05you can hear it even earlier.
04:07And with that, in real time, in a one-to-one relation, drive a vehicle from afar, right?
04:13So that vehicle can be, can be any, any distance away.
04:17And right now we started with cars as a vehicle type, but we also started to apply it to any
04:23kind of different vehicle types.
04:25And really by removing the physical driver from a vehicle.
04:29And I think the exciting thing is right now we were able to show, you know, to the industry that
04:37it's working, right?
04:38That the technology is there, that you can take this and now apply this to any kind of vehicle types
04:42and different use cases.
04:43And we are very excited, obviously, to start with a very specific one in Las Vegas.
04:47But I think the main takeaway is here that tele-driving and remote driving technology is really a technology that's
04:52out there right now.
04:53And we can take it and use it and scale it, right?
04:58Unlike, for example, robotaxes or other technologies.
05:01And yeah, that's, that's the exciting thing.
05:03And what I believe we and the industry is right now, is right now showing.
05:09And so Thomas, when you thought about tele-driving, you didn't start with like the most easy application, closed doors,
05:18something quite easy.
05:19You started directly with service that should be a consumer first.
05:23And so now that you've launched the first commercial service for like people like you and I, being able to
05:30use the service using tele-driving in Las Vegas just a couple of months ago, right?
05:37Yeah, that's correct.
05:38So when we started off with VAY, the vision of VAY is how can we help solve transportation in metropolitan
05:44areas, right?
05:45Like how can we get rid of all these parked cars that are clogging our streets?
05:50And, you know, that's the vision that's been what we've all been going for over the last, you know, over
05:55five years.
05:57As you've seen in the video, you might think, oh, maybe you do something like robotaxes.
06:00Actually not in competition with robotaxes, even if they emerge, because it's a completely different and new mobility service, right?
06:08How it works is you click a button.
06:10So today you can go to Las Vegas, you can download the VAY app.
06:13You can click a button and then an electric vehicle comes to you tele-driven, so no person is inside.
06:19And then the customer gets inside and drives him or herself, right?
06:23They get behind the steering wheel.
06:25At that point, the tele-driver goes off and drives another car somewhere else.
06:29And the customer, you know, has the freedom to do with the car whatever she wants to do.
06:36And then at the end of the journey, another tele-driver just comes in and parks the car for the
06:42customer.
06:43So no need to walk to the car, no need to park the car, so that makes it a door
06:46-to-door mobility service
06:48at about half of the price of ride hailing, right?
06:51So it's by far the most affordable door-to-door transport, as well as being, you know, cities like Hamburg,
06:57also Las Vegas are very excited, and ourselves too, is by doing that really having an alternative
07:02to private car ownership given the low price point and using highly-utilized electric vehicles
07:08and hence also doing something very good for us as a society.
07:12And that's what we set out to do now all these years ago and continue to see, you know,
07:19to continue to grow this now in Las Vegas.
07:22It's very exciting, like we really just launched, right?
07:26So it's a very unique moment, I believe, of this company where we are now in commercial operation
07:33and we really start to see very interesting traction from users who start to use it basically on a daily
07:38basis, right?
07:39Because maybe they live in a household, or we know that they don't live in a household with two cars,
07:42but just one, right?
07:44They use it to go to work on a daily basis because of the low price point, they use it
07:48to run errands.
07:50And yeah, it's just a very exciting time.
07:52We're really in this beginning of starting to scale this in the different geographies, starting in Las Vegas.
08:00And yeah, that's what we do.
08:02And what we announced today, as you mentioned, is now on the backbone of this success
08:07and people say, hey, this is actually not theory, it's actually out there and it's working.
08:11We started to see and also explore a lot of B2B partnership opportunities to use teledriving,
08:17not just for this new driverless car sharing service, but also for many other verticals, trucks and vans and so
08:25forth.
08:25So if we delve a bit more into the other opportunities, it's mostly what?
08:28Like logistics or can I get my own car and have teledriving or get teledrive?
08:35What do you think is coming?
08:37Yeah, so there's various different additional verticals now that we're exploring and, you know,
08:45integrate now teledriving into the different vehicle types.
08:48Important to know, I think, is that unlike robotaxis, teledriving is camera based, right?
08:55So it's just cameras and that means that the hardware cost that you have to add to the vehicle is
09:03very low, right?
09:05It can be negligible almost that we have seen now cars and other vehicles that are planned for 26, 27
09:12that are drive by wire.
09:13You can actually control them through software.
09:15They have all the cars already for ADA systems.
09:19So you can think that, you know, retrofitting teledriving into any kind of vehicle type is extremely inexpensive.
09:26So we see a world where in 2030, the majority or, you know, all the different vehicle types that roll
09:34off the production line are teledriving enabled.
09:37Meaning that you can just on demand get a person to drive that car who doesn't have to be obviously
09:43physically in the car.
09:43And that enables different verticals.
09:46So we obviously have the driverless car sharing.
09:49So we do this ourselves in Las Vegas with the benefits that I just described.
09:55You also had another announcement recently where we do this in a B2B play in Belgium.
10:01Then there is logistics, Vans, something that we announced to partner with Peugeot, light commercial vehicles.
10:10So these are the vehicles that are being used to deliver parcels, Amazon and DHL and others.
10:15And the use case there is that we can teledrive a vehicle.
10:20They are often parked outside in some parking areas and they drive to the warehouse.
10:25And then they often wait 30 or even more minutes to get loaded.
10:29So obviously the teledriver to get these 20 cars to the warehouse.
10:33You basically just need one teledrive just drives these cars, like these vans to the warehouse.
10:38And then during loading time, you know, the people on the ground would do that.
10:42So you save a lot of or you gain a lot of efficiency to use there.
10:47And then the teledriver would take that truck and drive it actually to the delivery zone, right?
10:51Like downtown Paris or downtown Las Vegas.
10:54And only then the physical driver comes in and starts delivering these vehicles.
10:58Starts delivering the parcels.
11:00And so this is an example that can be like can, you know, really turn upside down the industries for
11:08vans.
11:09We talk also a lot about personal carro to integrate this.
11:13This is, you know, the one that you also were referring to.
11:16So think about like I gave a recent interview to a German reporter in Las Vegas.
11:22And he said, I love what you do.
11:23And for me, always how I pitch it is that as a German, you drive your own car to a
11:28soccer stadium, right?
11:29And then you get out and then you click a button and then the teledriver parks the car somewhere at
11:34a parking lot quite far away.
11:36So it's cheap to park.
11:37Then you're at the soccer stadium.
11:39You have a few beers to drink.
11:40And then you click a button again and your personal car comes back.
11:43And then you're being teledriven home, right?
11:45So it's basically a teleballet on demand or telechauffeur on demand.
11:51Also very interesting for your kids to potentially don't have to drive them to tennis or to school.
11:55So you can really on demand have this in your personal car.
11:58So that's another very big use case that we believe teledriving can address with massive benefits for the customer, obviously,
12:06but also for OEMs generating revenue after they sold the vehicle.
12:10These are items that would take a bit longer time because you would have to integrate it into vehicles.
12:17And then the last part is trucks, right?
12:22And there I think this is a combination also of robo-trucks and robo-taxis.
12:27We often also get access like this bridge to autonomous driving.
12:30How does this work together?
12:31And on trucks, for example, itself, they have a huge driver shortage.
12:35It's also not a very great job to travel through Europe or through the US.
12:41So in this case, you could potentially have a truck driver be centralized close to the family.
12:48We see teledriver as the job of the future.
12:50You are together as a team.
12:51You can have bathroom breaks and don't have to be across the continent away from your family
12:57and leverage that for these applications too.
13:02Okay.
13:03Thomas, if we take a step back, when you founded the company in what, 2018?
13:082018, yes.
13:09I mean, in 2018, everybody was talking about like autonomous vehicle.
13:13Everybody was predicting like autonomous vehicle would be there in the streets like five years, maybe six, six years from
13:21now.
13:22The question was not like if, but when.
13:25Today, the picture is a bit different.
13:28I think cruise has shut down.
13:30It's really like driverless vehicles.
13:34We don't know if actually from a feasibility perspective, this can really work.
13:39like, what's your take?
13:41Do you think that, I mean, fully autonomous vehicles, is it still something which is feasible?
13:48What's the timeline?
13:50Like, what do you think?
13:53Yeah, it's been an interesting year to say the least, right?
13:56We saw a big race of wave in the UK.
13:59We saw cruise shutting down the fully driverless operation because of safety concerns.
14:07Maybe it makes sense to first define when we talk about robotaxis and autonomous driving.
14:13There's just two main camps, right?
14:15One is robotaxis.
14:16How we think about it, I guess, from the media and as a first thought.
14:22So these are the companies like Waymo, Cruise, Zoox and others who put a lot of mainly lighter sensors.
14:29So these are laser sensors scanning the environment.
14:31They use cameras, many, many, many cameras, radars, expensive compute to put this onto a vehicle
14:39that they will never be able to sell to private car customers because it's just so expensive, right?
14:45So the use case that they're after with this is robotaxis.
14:48So that's a highly utilised vehicle with relatively high revenue per kilometre because it's like ride hailing.
14:54And then there's the other camp of the incremental approach to autonomous driving, right?
15:00So this is the level two, level three player.
15:02So this is more assistant driving where a lot of the, you know, the OEMs are in this camp
15:08or like a Mobileye, a Tesla, Stellantis and others who work on technology that you can still sell to private
15:17car customers
15:18and have an assistant, like lane keeping assist and then over time work up the ladder.
15:24So hopefully at some point they can do robotaxis so that nobody has to be in the car anymore.
15:28So, and I think both of these have different pros and cons and different benefits.
15:32So if you were to ask me on the first one, on the Wayman Cruise, and to your point, I
15:37started working on robotaxis in 2017
15:43and it was in three years we'll have driverless cars everywhere in entire San Francisco.
15:49And it feels like it's always three years out, right?
15:53Now there's been ups and downs.
15:54We were a very pessimistic valley and then it went up and now maybe with Cruise we're down again.
15:59But the matter of the fact, I believe this is my personal opinion.
16:02It's really, really unclear.
16:04Like nobody knows.
16:05And that's a very exciting place to be in.
16:08But it's very unclear if the current approach how we have robotaxis will be there at scale, right?
16:14The first question is technology and safety, right?
16:17There's only Waymo, right, that is out there right now, fully driverless.
16:23Other companies, we have to see if they can do this at a small scale, similar to Waymo slash Google.
16:29The second one is, does this make sense as a cost, from a cost perspective, right?
16:33Because I think also people think, hey, if you put these hardware on there, it must be cheaper than a
16:40human.
16:40It's actually by far not.
16:41It's extremely expensive to operate these robotaxis.
16:44The lighter sensors are obviously expensive from a capex perspective.
16:48But you also have to maintain them, calibrate them.
16:50You have a high degree of remote operators, right?
16:54Waymo and also Cruise, there were some numbers how many human interventions are remotely there.
16:58So it's very unclear at this point, from a cost commercial perspective, to do that.
17:02What's the payback cost of a robotaxi?
17:05Nobody knows.
17:06And it's difficult.
17:09At the same time, they also have to compete against Uber, right?
17:12So they don't drive highways, so they have to take longer routes.
17:15People are expected to have five minutes ETA, right?
17:18Versus, and that's, you know, from a cost perspective, it's not so easy.
17:22And then the third one is regulatory parts, right?
17:24It's, in different jurisdictions, it's unclear on these fronts.
17:29So, I would say for robotaxis, it's the same as, I would always say, it's like, feels like it's three
17:35years out, but nobody really knows.
17:37And that's on robotaxis.
17:39For the second part, the OEMs, I think people, so, people maybe put this together with a robotaxi camp.
17:49But, again, this is my own personal opinion, right?
17:51So, you should take this with a grain of salt.
17:53I think we're very, very, very far away from anything that drives as a robotaxi.
17:59So, level four driving with a sensor set that you have in personal cars, right?
18:03People say, hey, yeah, let's do everything camera based.
18:06But it's so difficult, right?
18:08In particular, if you want to do this in urban environments, right?
18:12And also, though, these, I believe, will be rolled out gradually, meaning they would start in certain geofences and so
18:19forth.
18:19But it's extremely unlikely, in my opinion, that we'll see these vehicles that are sold to private cars,
18:26and hence have to have a low price point doing any kind of robotaxis in the next five years, in
18:33a level four manner.
18:34Level two and level three, I think it's different.
18:36But, yeah, that would be my answer.
18:38Okay.
18:39Thanks, Thomas.
18:40Super insightful.
18:42If we speak a bit to the entrepreneurs in the room, like, when you started six years ago, like, what
18:50got you started?
18:51You were working, I guess, in large corporates in the Silicon Valley.
18:55What prompted you, really, to start this business, go back to Europe?
19:01Yeah.
19:02Yeah, so, we moved back about, you know, about five years.
19:10The reason why we moved back, I often get asked, why did you move back, right?
19:12You should have stayed there.
19:13It's, it's, it's, my original goal was always to go there, learn from the best, because I had my first
19:19startup in Europe,
19:19and then wanted to come back to Europe after, and then it was so exciting there, and I just stayed
19:24there.
19:24And at some point, I was, you know, I had a very, you know, good job, we decided to come
19:29back to Europe,
19:29because I believe it's just very important that we're here in Europe and bring innovation from, from Europe into the
19:38world, right?
19:39I, I, I, we're headquartered now in Berlin.
19:41I think Paris, you know, the ecosystem has been doing a great job in particular on focusing also on deep
19:47tech and other parts.
19:49In Berlin, I would say it's not as deep tech-ish, right? It's, it's, it's more on the operations side
19:55of things.
19:56So, building a, a tech company out of Europe, I believe is, is important, and hopefully we can encourage many
20:03other, you know,
20:05startup founders or people who want to join a young startup.
20:08Yeah, think big and, and found and joined companies here, here in Europe, right?
20:14And I believe now with what we've achieved with teledriving and also now closing the loop with the autonomous driving
20:23sector,
20:24that we are with teledriving, we're in a really good spot to show this, right?
20:29It's, it's, by the way, it's not just us, there's other companies also in Europe that do, maybe on private
20:32grounds, on forklifts and others, right?
20:34That we as Europe can take this technology and really educate the world that, hey, we can, we can, we
20:39can lead here.
20:40And, yeah, I think that's exciting time. And the last thing I think I want to mention is, like, I
20:46often get asked,
20:47is this a bridge technology, right? If autonomous driving is there, whether it's the first camp or the second camp.
20:52And the exciting thing, I believe it's not, right? And my background is in autonomous driving.
20:58And the main reason why it's not is that I, I see a future, you know, of the next 10
21:02years where humans and robots work together, right?
21:06Some parts will be done by humans, some parts will be done by autonomous driving, right? Or robots.
21:13And teledriving now enables two things, right? One is that we generate a lot of ground truth data, right?
21:21The teledriver actually teach the system how to drive on a high quality manner.
21:25And based then on human feedback, we can develop autonomous driving technology ourselves or also with great partners in this
21:36space.
21:36And the other one that remote driving unlocks is that you can split the task, right?
21:42You can say certain parts would be autonomy, like going straight on highways, going, doing low speed maneuvers, and do
21:50this autonomous.
21:51And the other parts, you know, the remaining 10, 20%, I would be done by a teledriver, the unprotected turns,
21:59the roundabouts that are difficult.
22:02And so this is where we see the future.
22:04And that I believe we now as Europe can really bring this technology as well as this approach to the
22:09masses.
22:09I'm very excited to do that over the next, you know, months and years out of Europe.
22:14Okay. Thanks a lot, Thomas. I think, and congrats again for this big partnership with Peugeot.
22:22I think it's not everywhere that we see, like a car OEM, European car OEM partnering with tech companies
22:30and bringing tech forward and pushing it into the real world.
22:34So congrats for that. And thank you very much for coming here.
22:38Thanks, everyone.
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