This company wants to make your next car automated for freeway driving for $1,500

Troy — Hands- and eyes-free driving on highways for $1,500 is the goal of Ghost Autonomy, a California startup that recently opened an office and garage in Novi.

By the end of the year, Ghost expects to be testing exit ramp-to-exit ramp functionality of its system that it says can go on any vehicle and hopes it'll start appearing in automakers' products in 2025, said Jay Gierak, chief marketing officer. The Michigan office is focused on integrating the technology with customers' vehicles. It hopes to start making the names of those companies public later this year.

The automakers most willing to speak with Ghost, evaluate its technology and assess whether it can share product liability seem to be those with smaller research and development operations in-house, Gierak said. Additionally, Ghost has spoken to companies that aren't sure that their own technology will be able to scale down for more mainstream vehicles.

"This is a technology that the individual auto companies are so competitive about it and so secretive about it," Gierak said. But with Ghost's system, "a major auto manufacturer can put it in their $20,000 and $30,000 car, not just their $100,000 or $200,000 cars."

Ghost takes a Tesla Inc. approach to autonomous technologies, Gierak said. It focuses on less hardware and more on software. Its pilot uses cameras meant to work like a human's two-eyed vision, radar and microchips, but not lidar at least for now while focused on expressways. Artificial intelligence translates what is captured to identify the road, lanes, vehicles and other objects.

Ghost defines its technology ambitions as “Level 4” on SAE International’s autonomous scale, while using a suite of hardware tools more commonly found on Level 2 advanced driver assistance systems, Gierak said. That's typically when drivers must have their eyes on the road and are required to keep their hands on the wheel at least in most conditions.

Level 4 would put it in the same category as Google affiliate Waymo LLC’s or General Motors Co. subsidiary Cruise LLC’s driverless taxis, which Gierak described as "hardware intensive." Ghost's system isn't doing what those vehicles can do, at least yet.

"What we're shooting for is you don't pay attention," Gierak said. "The system is so safe that you can always put the driver and the vehicle into a safe spot no matter what happens. There's no 'Grab the wheel, or you're in trouble.'"

Ghost does hope to start testing its system on suburban roads next year, Gierak said. The idea would be eventually to offer an over-the-air update to vehicles outfitted with its technology that would expand its service beyond highways.

"We saw highways as the best place to get to that high level where people can truly not pay attention," Gierak said, "but still solve 60-plus percent of their miles, the most monotonous, boring miles that you take on your commute every day."

The startup originally expect to offer a retrofit approach for the system on existing vehicles. It, however, found customers are more wary of that: "They'd like to see it come with a car with the OEM's blessing," Gierak said.

On a brief recent road test on Interstate 75 shortly before rush-hour traffic, a 2017 Toyota Camry with Ghost’s pilot once on the highway stayed in its lane, kept a safe following distance and smoothly adjusted its speed to the vehicles around it. It also was able to change lanes on its own, but had to be instructed when to do so with the turn signal. That will change once the programming to merge onto and off the highway is added, said Justin Erickson, chief engineering officer.

Additionally, engineers have to take into consideration, he said, "what's the appropriate speed trade-off that you actually can do in relation with if traffic is faster and not be one of those people that just goes back and forth" between lanes all the time.

Ghost began in 2017 by John Hayes, its CEO, and computer scientist Volkmar Uhlig. Hayes is the founder of Pure Storage Inc., a now-public data storage business in California that, like Ghost, leverages hardware to make reliable software.

Ghost now has 120 employees who are mostly engineers. It has offices — in addition to its headquarters and the new Detroit site at 25909 Meadowbrook Road — in Dallas, emphasizing radar technology and in Sydney, Australia, focused on software development. Also among its ranks is Jackie Glassmen, Ghost’s general counsel and acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2002 to 2006.

The startup has about a dozen vehicles it’s testing. They’ve driven in Michigan, California, Nevada and Canada, with the company putting more than 10,000 miles on the road each month. That’s ramping up this summer with more states being added. Additionally, it performs a lot of simulations.

The system uses GPS to alert the driver once the vehicle is on a highway, and the system is able to take over by the driver removing his or her hands from the wheel and releasing the gas pedal. The driver can take back control just as easily. The driver also can accelerate the vehicle's speed with the brake pedals while the vehicle still steers.

"People enjoy their cars and enjoy driving when there are open roads and nice spots, but may not enjoy the monotonous commute," Erickson said. "I get to choose when I want to do that."

Ghost uses two types of cameras. The stereo vision cameras are dual cameras mimicking the work of human eyes to determine the distance of every pixel captured. Single cameras are used for detecting lanes and other objects. Radar also captures the scene that can be combined with what the cameras are collecting to understand better what's around the car. Neural networks in a computer that fits compactly in a trunk or under a passenger seat then create a plan to navigate the road. The system also is being developed to communicate with the native navigation system in a vehicle's infotainment system to know which exit to take, as well.

Originally, the vehicles weren’t able to speed. While testing on California freeways, however, developers learned that actually became a precarious affair at times. The company has alerted the governments in which it does testing that its vehicles now will go up to 10% over the speed limit based on traffic conditions.

"We literally had people honking and driving us off the side of the road," Erickson said. "We said, 'OK, this is just not safe for us to drive at those sort of speed limits.' So, we basically said, 'All right, let's adjust within reason to the flow of traffic, so if everybody's driving egregiously fast, then we're not going to go there, but we are going to adjust it to maintain some of the flow of traffic."

There’s a market for these types of driver assist systems, said Sam Abuelsamid, principal e-mobility analyst at market research firm Guidehouse Inc. Customers are buying vehicles with GM’s SuperCruise and Ford Motor Co.’s Blue Cruise, which often are called “Level 2+” systems, because they allow drivers to remove their hands from the wheel under certain circumstances. Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot system it calls “self-driving” has proved financially fruitful, despite federal scrutiny over its claims and use.

Communicating for what the systems are designed has become a challenge for manufacturers, Abuelsamid said.

“Manufacturers have not done a great job of really explaining what the constraints are: what the systems can do and what they can’t do,” he said. “A big part of the problem is dealers and their retail staff. They don’t understand what they are selling. They can barely explain adaptive cruise control or their infotainment system. With the car taking over more and more of the driving function, it gets even worse. Customers are more and more likely to end up in a situation where they misuse the system. That’s how you end up getting into crashes.”

That opens up questions of liability. In the event of an accident, especially when an autonomous system is used under the proper conditions, the responsibility will fall on the automakers and their suppliers, Abuelsamid said. That could represent a challenge for startups with limited financial resources in this space.

“If it probably doesn’t have the resources to (take on liability), manufacturers might not be willing to utilize their system,” Abuelsamid said. “Mass-market consumers would like to have a system like this in their vehicles. At the price point, can they make it good enough to make it reliable so that they can take on the liability for the system?”

Gierak said Ghost will lean on its automaker partners to make determinations around the best way and timing to bring vehicles with its features to market.

"We are a startup that sells products to OEMs and do joint testing and validation with OEMs. So ultimately, we, of course, have our own safety and testing regimen," Gierak said. "But ultimately, when it comes to validation and deployment at scale, it's all about partnering with the OEMs. That's what they know better than anybody else."

He recognized consumer doubts about AVs are a challenge the industry faces, but said Ghost is pressing forward at full speed to prove the value of a hands-free, eyes-free system.

"This is going to happen," he said. "And it's not just going to happen in San Francisco and Phoenix. It's going to actually happen for you and your car at a price that everybody can afford."

bnoble@detroitnews.com

Twitter: @BreanaCNoble