Navya pulls the handbrake on autonomous driving, a less hyped area


2020 was supposed to be a benchmark year for autonomous vehicles, Bloomberg wrote, and it has been two years now. The world has inherited a health crisis and the so-called car of the future has remained in the garage.

For the Lyon startup Navya and its autonomous shuttle project Shuttle, the news is also at a standstill. A user wishing to find out about the company’s Evo vehicle is redirected to another page.

Navya no longer convinces investors

And this one doesn’t lead you into the future of self-driving, but into a less rosy present for the company. Navya announces that on January 25 it filed a declaration of cessation of payments with the Commercial Court of Lyon.

Indeed, it is impossible for the company to rely on the stock market and its shares to collect sufficient funds “allowing it to cover all of its cash needs. Moreover, all attempts to back it up with investors have failed. “

For Navya, which raised 30 million euros in 2016, it is now the receivership that is emerging on the horizon. The French company has filed a request to this effect with the commercial court. This procedure is equivalent to a reprieve to seek solutions.

However, the future is very uncertain for the startup, a pioneer in France of autonomous driving for the B2B segment. Investors and venture capital, in a difficult economic context, are cautious.

The race for autonomy in slow motion

This reluctance is reflected in a decline in fundraising and company valuations, a phenomenon to which tech does not escape, as reflected in the GAFAM layoff plans.

Moreover, among the 12,000 departures announced by Alphabet (Google), part will affect its subsidiary Waymo and its activities dedicated to autonomous driving. Some see it as a consequence of the economic environment, but also questions about the time-to-market of these technologies.

Although commercial deployments have taken place, they remain limited. Without scaling up, it seems complex to make the heavy investments made to develop autonomous driving systems profitable.

Before full autonomy (level 5), manufacturers must already manage to truly industrialize level 3 or semi-autonomy. These are then certain functions that are delegated to the machine.

Investors cautious about innovations

In Europe, the news of autonomous driving therefore remains mainly focused on experiments. And for car manufacturers, the priority is undoubtedly that of the electrification of the fleet.

On the side of network operators like Keolis and Transdev, the challenge of the moment is also that of mastering electricity – even if they have been carrying out tests of autonomous shuttles for several years.

As for venture capital, the current global situation encourages it to be cautious about disruptive technologies. This also applies to Web3 and the metaverse, areas in which investors favor more mature technologies.





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