May Mobility has launched a corporate autonomous vehicle service that uses Toyota’s e-Palette BEV vehicle at the Toyota Motor Kyushu (TMK) Miyata factory in in Fukuoka, Japan.
The service uses a custom version of the e-Palette battery-electric mobility-as-a-service vehicle platform and will provide “an efficient and effective transit option” for factory employees and guests, May Mobility says.
Back in 2022, May Mobility was granted access to Toyota’s e-Palette platform to install May Mobility technologies, including its autonomous driving kit and Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) technology. May Mobility has since performed testing and evaluation in Japan, demonstrating performance requirements and improved vehicle behavior.
The all-electric Toyota e-Palette platform will come pre-configured with leads for third-party autonomous driving kits, including spaces for sensors and computing systems. Using the data gathered from the sensors, May Mobility’s MPDM technology will enable real-time learning, assessing thousands of potential scenarios per second, even when encountering novel situations, allowing the e-Palette to leverage AI to improve its driving capabilities during TMK deployment.
“Our long-standing relationship with Toyota is key to driving innovation within the mobility-as-a-service space and I’m excited to expand our autonomous vehicle product offering with the e-Palette’s larger, EV form factor,” said Edwin Olson, CEO and co-founder of May Mobility.
The service at TMK provides a transportation option to employees and guests during business hours – Monday through Friday. The service route includes six stops at regular intervals through a pre-planned loop, starting from the southeast corner of the facility and continuing around the northern end before returning to its origin location. This is intended to serve as the first of several future deployments of e-Palette transportation services in Japan. Complying with local safety regulations, the e-Palette vehicles used in the Toyota factory will have an autonomous vehicle operator (AVO) to supervise the vehicle.
MONET Technologies is also participating in this project and will collaborate on additional services in the future. May Mobility is also working investor NTT for future service rollouts in Japan.