Self-Driving Industry Awards 2024 – meet the judges: Alex Bainbridge
After selling online reservation service TourCMS in 2015, tourism entrepreneur Alex Bainbridge launched Autoura to build digital sightseeing products specifically for self-driving vehicles.
“I’m delighted to be involved in judging the Self-Driving Industry Awards again,” he said. “While the other judges have incredible technical expertise, I’m more focussed on successful commercialisation and the customer experience.
“These might be Cars of the Future awards, but for the tourism industry, particularly for Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) making decisions about vehicle purchases, this is a live issue today. Luxurious coaches pay for themselves over 7-15 years, and over that timescale we’re going to see widescale rollout of self-driving buses, smaller shuttles and cars.
Self-driving tourism
“From a tourist’s perspective, when you remove the driver, you need a new way to answer questions like: ‘What’s happening in town today?’ or ‘Where should we go for dinner?’. Our AI characters deliver tourism experiences both within vehicles and outside them, so they work for pedestrians and cyclists as well.
“We’re currently testing it as a consumer product in the US. We’re also in discussion with AV operators because distribution agreements would obviously make the whole thing more streamlined. Autoura now has 30 autonomous vehicle tourism experiences available to try using publicly available robotaxis such as Waymo in San Francisco.
“In the not-too-distant future, human-driven vehicles will become ever rarer and self-driving operators will be in competition with each other. They’ll have to differentiate their offerings, and that’s something the tourism industry has traditionally been very good at.
“Taking a sightseeing trip in a self-driving car, or a small electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, as opposed to a coach, is a huge change. The interaction can be much more personalised – high quality real-world experiences at a very affordable price point, all enabled by amazing connected and automated vehicle technologies.
“I look forward to highlighting those who’ve made the most progress across all vital areas, from software to regulation, since last year’s inaugural awards.”
In our Zenzic CAM Creator interview with Alex way back in 2020 he predicted “The transition to autonomous will start with CAVs running routes like buses”.
Last November we were delighted to present our inaugural Self-Driving Vehicle of the Year Award to Project CAVForth… a fleet of five single-decker, low-emission Stagecoach buses which have been taking fares in Scotland daily since May 2023.
