Ottomotto

Ottomotto LLC, d/b/a Otto, was an American self-driving technology company founded in January 2016 by Lior Ron and Anthony Levandowski.

The company was based in San Francisco and employed 90 people as of August 2016. The company focused on retrofitting semi trucks with radars, cameras and laser sensors to make them capable of driving themselves. In August 2016, Otto was acquired by Uber. Lior Ron, the co-founder of the company, had stated that Otto would have self-driving fleets of trucks on the road by early 2017, which, before the company ceased, never materialized.

History

Otto was established in January 2016,[1] and was one of a new generation of automobile firms venturing into making self-driving vehicles.[2] The company was founded by Anthony Levandowski, who worked on the Google self-driving car project, and Lior Ron, who was a product lead on the Google Maps team.[1]

Technology and goals

Otto did not build its own trucks. Instead, the company made hardware kits which could be installed on trucks at service centers or factories.[17][18] They used similar technology to those developed by Google and Nissan, equipping the trucks with radar, cameras, and lidar.[1]

The goal of the company over the first few years was stated to be for the technology to be used by truck drivers during long-haul drives to allow them to rest during the journey. This in turn would reduce the number of hours it took for drivers to complete a journey by potentially being able to drive continuously,[19] and overcome the 11-hour legal restriction on manual driving.[20] The automated technology was intended to make driving more efficient, and allow a truck driver to sleep while the truck is driving itself.[1] In 2016, Levandowski stated: "Our goal is to make trucks drive as humanly as possible, but with the reliability of machines."[3]

According to John Markoff of The New York Times, Otto made the conscious decision to automate trucks rather than passenger vehicles because, “Nationally, trucks drive 5.6 percent of all vehicle miles and are responsible for 9.5 percent of highway fatalities.”[1] In an interview with Emily Chang of Bloomberg West, David Kirkpatrick, the CEO of Techonomy Media, stated that the public was far more likely to embrace trucks with automated driving than passenger vehicles due to the wide perception that trucks are driven dangerously by truckers.[19] The need to make truck driving safer was one of the aims of the firm. Ron was quoted as saying: "We want to get the technology to the point where it's safe to let the driver rest and sleep in his cabin and we can drive for him, exit to exit."[21]

Eventually the company hoped to develop trucks able to drive autonomously on the 220,000 miles of highways in the US,[3] though in some states such as California there may have been regulatory obstacles.[1][3] The firm intended to collect safety data to demonstrate the benefits of the automated technology.[22]

type	Subsidiary
foundation	January 2016
founders	Anthony Levandowski Lior Ron Claire Delaunay Don Burnette
hq location	737 Harrison
hq location city	San Francisco, California
hq location country	U.S.
industry	Automotive, technology
defunct	2018
fate	Defunct
products	Self-driving kit for long-haul trucks
parent	Uber
website	http://ot.to

History

Technology and goals

See also

External links

References