May Mobility launches autonomous e-Palette deployment at Toyota Motor Kyushu factory in Fukuoka, Japan

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Dec 03, 2024, 08:00 ET

Toyota's e-Palette is a customizable battery-electric, mobility-as-a-service vehicle platform with options for transporting passengers
The May Mobility service provides additional transportation options to employees and guests around Toyota Motor Kyushu Co's Miyata factory campus

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Dec. 3, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- May Mobility, an autonomous driving (AD) technology company, today announced the launch of a corporate autonomous vehicle (AV) service that will utilize Toyota's e-Palette mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) vehicle platform in Fukuoka, Japan at Toyota Motor Kyushu Co.'s (TMK) Miyata factory. The service uses a custom version of the e-Palette battery-electric vehicle and will provide an efficient and effective transit option for factory employees and guests.

The Toyota e-Palette, powered by May Mobility's autonomous driving technology, drives down a private street at the Toyota Motor Kyushu's Miyata factory.

Three employees take a ride on the Toyota e-Palette, powered by May Mobility's autonomous driving technology

In 2022, May Mobility was provided access to Toyota's next-generation e-Palette platform to install May Mobility's technologies into the e-Palette platform, including its autonomous driving kit and Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) technology. To prove the technology's capability, May Mobility performed robust testing and evaluation in Japan, demonstrating key performance requirements and improved vehicle behavior.

The Toyota e-Palette is a battery-electric, mobility-as-a-service vehicle platform. The e-Palette will come pre-configured with leads for third-party autonomous driving kits, including spaces for sensors and computing systems.

Using the data gathered from sensors around the vehicle, May Mobility's patented MPDM technology will enable real-time reinforcement learning, assessing thousands of potential scenarios per second, even when encountering never-before-seen situations, allowing May Mobility's technology in the e-Palette to leverage artificial intelligence to continuously improve its driving capabilities during the course of the 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. "Toyota's e-Palette platform together with May Mobility's technologies will help drive us toward our vision of greater transportation accessibility across Japan."

The new service at TMK provides an additional transportation option to employees and guests during regular business hours, Monday through Friday. The service route includes six stops at regular intervals through a designated zone or loop, starting from the southeast corner and continuing up and around the northern end of the facility before returning to its origin location. This is intended to serve as the first of a number of future deployments of e-Palette transportation services in Japan. Following local safety regulations, the e-Palette vehicles used in the Toyota Miyata factory will have an autonomous vehicle operator (AVO) to supervise the vehicle's autonomous driving.

The service at the Miyata factory is one of several operations planned for Japan this year. MONET Technologies is also participating in this project and will collaborate on additional services in the future. May Mobility will also work with its investor NTT for future service rollouts in Japan.

May Mobility has provided more than 400,000 rides in the U.S. and Japan, including deployments in Nagoya City, Japan; Ann Arbor, MI; Detroit, MI; Grand Rapids, MN; Miami, FL; Arlington, TX; Martinez, CA; and Sun City, AZ.

About May Mobility
May Mobility is an autonomous driving (AD) technology company redefining the future of autonomous mobility-as-a-service (MaaS). Leveraging its patented Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) system, May Mobility built the first-ever in-situ AI, which integrates real-time data every 200 milliseconds to ensure safety and efficiency, even in unpredictable situations. This revolutionary technology pairs live, online learning with traditional offline training, enabling rapid global deployment at half the cost and one-third of the time. Operating fleets of on-demand shared ride vehicles across the U.S. and Japan, May Mobility delivers safer, more efficient transportation across diverse environments, including rural cities, dense urban areas and challenging weather conditions. Backed by strategic partnerships with industry leaders, including Toyota Motor Corporation and NTT, May Mobility is disrupting the autonomous vehicle industry with one of the most practical vehicle offerings available. The company has completed over 400,000 autonomy-enabled rides across 17 deployments worldwide. For more information, visit www.maymobility.com.

SOURCE May Mobility