TechCrunch talks off-road driving with Potential and Overland AI
21 May 2024
“Start-ups that don’t need roads” are attracting attention. TechCrunch’s Rebecca Bellan chatted to Potential and Overland AI to find out more.
“A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to city streets, these startups are taking their tech off-road.”
So writes Rebecca Bellan in her latest TechCrunch article. Rebecca is recognised as one of the world’s foremost journalists covering the intersection of transport and technology. In just the past four weeks, she’s produced breaking news and deep dives on Tesla, Uber, Volvo, Motional. Waymo, Cruise, Zeekr and Apple, to name a few.
Rebecca takes a look at where automated and autonomous vehicle technologies are today in the off-road space and notes that Potential is “poised to get a first-mover advantage on this segment of autonomy.”
“While these startups are applying their tech in different ways, Overland AI and Potential do share some common off-road ground. Founders of each startup believe they’ve cracked the code to one of the more challenging applications of automated driving by building software that doesn’t rely on some of the main crutches of testing and deployment — such as detailed maps, large swaths of training data and the ability to fall back on remote assistance.”
“...poised to get a first-mover advantage on this segment of autonomy.”
The article features interview comments from both our CEO, Sam Poirier, and our special advisor, Scott Kunselman.
“How can you actually enable somebody who maybe isn’t the 100% expert driver, but somebody who wants to go off-roading and experience these more challenging conditions?” asked Sam.
“There are things that the assistance tools can do that an individual driver — no matter how good your expertise — cannot do on their own,” Scott explained.
Rebecca’s insights were picked up by TechCrunch colleagues, with Potential making it into Haje Jan Kamp’s Startups Weekly and Kirsten Koresec’s TechCrunch Mobility roundups. The story was also covered by Yahoo Finance and Bezinga.
“Forget robotaxis stuck in city traffic — the latest craze is self-driving vehicles that laugh in the face of road maps. Overland AI and Potential are leading this off-road autonomy revolution.”