Optimus Ride announced a partnership with Polaris to bring fully autonomous GEM electric vehicles to market. Both will introduce a new line of Polaris GEM low-speed vehicles that will be engineered to fully integrate Optimus Ride’s autonomous software and hardware suite.
The microtransit vehicles are expected to come to market during the second half of 2023, when they’ll be deployed in geofenced, localized environments.
Optimus Ride has already deployed about 30 Polaris GEM vehicles, which have been retrofitted with Optimus Ride autonomous technology, for commercial ride-hailing operations in Brooklyn, Boston, California, Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia, or as part of testing.
Both the present set of GEMs and the next generation operate at Level 4 autonomy, which suggests they will operate without the need of a human operator. Despite the constraints of the geofenced environment, Harrington says the vehicles can fully interact with their environments.
