Michigan-based May Mobility has launched a corporate autonomous vehicle service that will use Toyota’s e-Palette mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) vehicle platform in Fukuoka, Japan.

At Toyota Motor Kyushu’s Miyata factory, the service is using a custom version of the e-Palette battery-electric vehicle and providing a transit option for factory employees and guests.

In 2022, May Mobility was provided access to Toyota’s e-Palette platform to install its technologies, including its autonomous driving kit and multi-policy decision-making (MPDM) technology. To prove the technology’s capability, May Mobility performed testing and evaluation in Japan, demonstrating performance requirements and improved vehicle behaviour.

The e-Palette (toyotatimes.jp/en/spotlights/1057.html) is a battery-electric, MaaS vehicle platform. It comes 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, the MPDM technology will enable real-time reinforcement learning, assessing thousands of potential scenarios per second, even when encountering never-before-seen situations, allowing the technology to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to improve continuously its driving capabilities during the course of the deployment.

“Our long-standing relationship with Toyota is key to driving innovation within the MaaS 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 of May Mobility. “Toyota’s e-Palette platform together with May Mobility’s technologies will help drive us towards our vision of greater transportation accessibility across Japan.”

The service at the factory provides an additional transportation option to employees and guests during regular business hours, Monday to 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 factory will have an autonomous vehicle operator to supervise the vehicle’s autonomous driving.

The service at the factory is one of several operations planned for Japan this year. Monet Technologies (www.monet-technologies.com) 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 USA and Japan, including deployments in Nagoya City, Japan; Ann Arbor and Detroit, Michigan; Grand Rapids, Minnesota; Miami, Florida; Arlington, Texas; Martinez, California; and Sun City, Arizona.

May Mobility (www.maymobility.com) is an autonomous driving technology company. Backed by partnerships with Toyota Motor and NTT, the company has completed more than 400,000 autonomy-enabled rides across 17 deployments worldwide.