Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Konstantin Maslennikov, CEO and Founder at HereYouGo:
Q: For those who haven’t heard of it, what is the best way to describe HereYouGo?
A: In short words, we are a rental service for connected and self-driving cars.
Today, self-driving technology is in the hands of large corporations and this technology partly integrated into very expensive cars. For an ordinary person, it is very costly to buy even the cheapest Tesla car, which has a prototype of a self-driving system. Moreover, most people use their cars only 4% of the time. They simply don’t need access to a car all day and night.
Our fractional ownership model will make it more affordable and easier to purchase and own self-driving vehicles and rent those highly automated cars. Our business will be a strong impulse to the widespread penetration of autonomous driving technology.
Q: What is the current situation with self-driving technology?
A: It is better just to ask when we will have self-driving cars, right? It is one of the most popular questions, and expert opinions vary a lot. Traditional automotive companies predict more than 15 years, Elon Musk claims that they already have the full self-driving capability in today’s Tesla cars. We will be happy either way. We just know that the cars will be self-driving at one point, and that time we will make them affordable for everyone.
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Q: What is your solution? How does it work?
A: The user will see the product as a mobile application with different roles: passenger, owner, and car administrator. For the role of the administrator, the section of car operational management will be available: the settings of time and area of driving, the car systems management, the payment for gasoline, car wash and other services. For the role of the car owner, the section of permissions and settings management will be available as well as the section of the assignment of the administrator. If the car is in the joint ownership the section for voting will additionally appear to make decisions and change settings that require the owners’ consensus. For the role of the passenger, the section of searching and the car booking will be available. This section is basic and available for all roles.
Q: What are you most excited about in the industry at the moment and what future trends are you expecting to see?
A: We are excited about how many talented people work on that problem. We spoke with many industry experts and it’s clear that self-driving technology will be one of the most disrupting things in our life. It will change the economy, it will change cities, it will change how we live.
The most important trend we see – change in car ownership patterns. Our generation doesn’t want to own a car. We love to drive from time to time, but everyday parking and traffic jams – not for young urban people, we want to use ridesharing apps.
That is why car ownership models already challenged, and those changes will be even more fundamental with self-driving technology.
And the creation of a new ownership system is exactly what we do.
Recommended: Q: What can we expect from HereYouGo in 2020?
A: We will build a good foundation for widespread of self-driving technology. We will start to build our model with connected cars, those vehicles can “talk to each other” by sharing data on speed, road conditions, and other factors. Many expensive cars on the roads already have those functions today. Until self-driving cars are available, we are going to build our system for connected cars. Right now you can join our efforts by contributing to the first car in our fleet. You can donate any amount and this contribution will be your prepayment for car rental with a good discount, also in the future, we will convert your donation to our fractional ownership system, you will become fleet co-owner (the first car will be located in Palo Alto, CA).
We are so excited about next year we have many plans – product launch, fleet management model testing, users interviews – oh, it will be fun!
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