And my hands aren't
His hands aren't moving.
Friggin robots driving this car.
My feet are on the floor, vehicle's driving by itself.
This is pretty wild.
[MUSIC]
So autonomous vehicles are actually operating here in New York City City.
They're here at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
This is the Optimus ride program.
It is a fleet of self driving vehicles that take employees within the Brooklyn Navy Yard as well as ferry commuters.
It is really cool.
I've never been in an autonomous vehicle before.
I'm gonna get a demo and understand how this all works.
Here we go.
[UNKNOWN]
Welcome aboard.
Optimist ride is an M-I-T spin off a developed self driving technology.
But instead of trying to take over main streets and roads optimists limited its development to geo fence locations, areas that the company can completely map with well established boundaries.
Those are, for example, residential communities, mixed developments, campuses, resorts and more.
All right, so here is how this all works.
There's two technicians that have to be inside the vehicle at all times just to sort of keep their eye on everything and make sure It's a safe ride and everything's sort of going to plan monitor the software that drives the vehicle.
But for all intents and purposes, the car is driving itself the computer and the software is driving the car.
I'm okay with them being here.
I would like that to be an option if things go wrong.
Self driving vehicles can move through these areas at about 25 miles per hour.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard is a 300 acre industrial park and the company's started here last August.
rides run seven days a week and meet passengers going to and from a recently opened Fairyland and This is free for anyone within the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
There's couple stops on this specific route.
People take it to get to the ferry, take it to get the work, complete the last mile of their country.
Commute.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
See, so it accounts for awful drivers.
Wow, that's some pretty sick maneuvering.
You gotta do that a lot in Manhattan.
A lot of people just pull over for no reason.
And all that's driving this, is just a laptop sitting on this gentleman's lap.
Accounts for all these obstacles in the world.
Okay, this looks complicated.
So we've got like a truck coming now and it's sort of just was like, Hey, I like that maybe.
And there it goes.
It's pretty wild.
Seeing a computer like think and I feel like that's what we're experiencing.
Right now is like seeing how the vehicle deals with human drivers.
[SOUND]
Did this thing just honk by itself?
No, I did that.
That would be cool.
[LAUGH] [SOUND]
Then it's a true New York vehicle here.
[MUSIC]
The company was founded in 2015 and is based in Boston.
He's been operating these vehicles at the Seaport District there since 2017.
Last year, it expanded into a development in Reston, Virginia, here to Brooklyn and to Fairfield, California.
Their next goal is to be fully driverless later in this year.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
The ride is complete.
So this is a really interesting approach with autonomous vehicles.
It's within this geo-fenced sort of campus location.
When people think of self-driving cars, they think of real life traffic situations, and yes, this definitely has to deal with that in this geo-fenced area, but it's not exactly fully autonomous.
But for now, this feels like the most practical application of self driving cars.
[MUSIC]
