What we talked about
Ben Seidl, CEO of AutoLane, delve into the transformative world of autonomous vehicles. Discover how these innovations are set to revolutionize mobility and logistics, reshaping our cities and daily lives. From the challenges of integrating autonomous technology with existing infrastructure to the potential for cars to become personal assistants, explore the exciting future of transportation and its profound implications for society.
Show notes
Ben Seidl bought a Tesla in August 2024 with no background in automotive and became so convinced autonomous vehicles would reshape commerce that he built a company around the problem most people hadn’t noticed: self-driving cars have no way to follow the rules of private property. His target for a fully autonomous commerce transaction, a car picking up a grocery order and driving home alone, was Christmas 2024.
What we covered
- Waymo has already surpassed Lyft in ride-hailing market share in San Francisco with a fleet of only around 300 vehicles in the Bay Area. Ben used this data point to argue that autonomous mobility is not a future scenario, it has already arrived on the ride-hailing side, but that logistics and commerce remain almost entirely untouched.
- The core problem AutoLane is solving is coordination on private property. When a Waymo arrives at a Chick-fil-A with no precise GPS coordinates or rule set for that parking lot, it makes a non-deterministic decision and, if that decision fails, it gives up, parking illegally or blocking traffic, because there is no framework for it to negotiate the way human drivers do with eye contact and gestures.
- AutoLane’s role is to translate a business’s intentions, where it wants autonomous vehicles to enter, which stalls to use, in what sequence, into approach vectors, GPS coordinates, and data labels that get fed back to AV companies. McDonald’s can set rules; AutoLane turns those rules into code that Waymo can actually follow.
- The compliance asymmetry is a major selling point for property owners. Human drivers ignore DoorDash pickup zones constantly because they have no incentive to comply. Autonomous vehicles, given precise instructions, will follow them 100% of the time, giving a property owner a level of control over vehicle flow that has never existed before.
- Ben described the Costco parking lot as a model for what autonomous vehicles make possible: send AVs through the most inconvenient entrance, park them furthest from the store, and reserve the best spots for human shoppers who are actually in a mood to spend money. The vehicle doesn’t care about inconvenience; the customer does.
- His broader argument is philosophical: most of the errands Americans run could already be completed without their physical presence, the only reason they go is because the car can’t drive itself. Recovering that time, he believes, is where technology’s real social value lies, allowing people to spend more time on things that provide meaning rather than on tasks that simply need to get done.
About Ben
Ben Seidl is the co-founder and CEO of AutoLane, a company building the operating system for curbside autonomy. AutoLane creates the physical and digital infrastructure that allows autonomous vehicles to interact with businesses on private property, enabling autonomous commerce transactions.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benseidl
- Website: https://www.goautolane.com
Episode 39 of the PreVetted Podcast.