How GM Cruise uses its Dashride acquisition to build a robo-taxi company

It started back in their college days when Thomas Bachant and Nadav Ullman were trying to get safe rides around the University of Connecticut campus. There was a disconnect between the partygoers who needed a ride and the designated, sober drivers.

So the two teamed up and built a mobile app, Sobrio, to make it easier to find someone going out but not drinking. When that took off at their campus they brought it to other universities. After graduation, they bought an RV and drove from campus to campus to get students hooked up to the ride platform.

Eventually they started getting calls from fleet managers who said that they wanted what they had built for universities for, say, a limo company’s service. Sobrio became Dashride and the team was then working with ground transportation companies on their dispatching software, booking, billing, and other operations. 

Now the co-founders are working with one of the biggest companies in the self-driving space, General Motor’s Cruise Automation. Cruise raised $1.15 billion earlier this month, now valuing the GM- and Honda-backed company at $19 billion. Late last year, the San Francisco-based autonomous vehicle company acquired Dashride and its seven-member engineering team. 

It makes a lot of sense: Cruise is preparing for a taxi service in San Francisco by the end of this year. As of February, 175 Cruise cars were registered for self-driving testing in California. The taxis will be autonomous all-electric Chevy Bolt cars — and several hundred will eventually be available for a hired ride as part of the Cruise network.

That’s a lot of charge levels, equipment, miles driven, maintenance checks and more to keep track of — which is where Dashride comes in.

Through their fleet management software the team is taking their experience monitoring and managing fleets of delivery, campus, and non-medical emergency vehicles and translating that into a system where one day no one’s in the driver’s seat noticing a low battery warning.

Bachant compared robo-cars to human-driven vehicles in a recent phone call with Mashable: “Think about a human with a car. They’re gonna know when their car is low on fuel, or when to go in for an oil change.” But now with Cruise the team is thinking about “how a fleet operates without drivers,” Ullman added. 

The “dash” in their acquired company’s name hints at the “mission control”-like dashboard that Cruise now uses to track its vehicles on a map and with key data points like charge level, time out on the road, and where that particular car is due next.

Fleet management is nothing new — for truck and delivery companies tracking trips and vehicles is crucial and has been for decades. Canadian company Geotab, a connected vehicle and data company, tracks 1.6 million vehicles, including many part of large commercial fleets like at PepsiCo and UPS.

Mike Branch, VP of data and analytics at Geotab, in a phone call last week explained how once fleets plug in the company’s device into the van, taxi, garbage truck, or other vehicles, Geotab “can tell you when your battery is going to die on your vehicle before it does.”

As fleets and long-haul truck routes slowly become robot-controlled, predicative maintenance and tracking data help manage an “unmanned” system that won’t have a driver to flag issues. 

“You need to be able to connect these things together,” Branch, speaking from the perspective of an actual autonomous vehicle, said, “Whether or not I’m healthy, what’s my tire pressure, how many miles have I driven, what’s my engine health, am I in range?”

As Cruise’s Bachant said, “we’ve already removed the human from the driver seat, now we remove it from operations.” It’s all about autonomy.