Self-driving vehicle startup Faction is bringing driverless delivery service to the San Francisco Bay Area, the company announced in December.
The first client of this service from San Francisco-based Faction is Cocola Bakery.
“Cocola Bakery and our customers have been ecstatic with the services Faction has provided us so far,” Amir Aliabadi, CEO of Cocola Bakery, said in a statement. “We are now able to quickly, affordably and reliably deliver our products to customers around the Bay Area, something we couldn’t easily accomplish before due to inconsistent gig-worker services.”
Faction will make its deliveries using lightweight electric vehicles based on three-wheel platforms from Arcimoto and from ElectraMeccanica. Equipped with Faction’s DriveLink and TeleAssist technologies, the company’s vehicle fleet combines autonomy with remote human teleoperation to carry out its deliveries.
Faction has made regular deliveries to Cocola Bakery’s customers since July. Faction is now looking to add additional delivery partners in the coming months to locations ranging from South San Francisco to Mountain View.
“Our partnership with Cocola is just the beginning of what we have planned for Faction,” Faction CEO Ain McKendrick said in a statement. “We’re achieving our cost and delivery targets while securing the data necessary to bring Faction and our technology to more partners in the coming year. The next phase is to make our services available to additional commercial customers in the Bay Area – restaurant chains, hardware stores, auto parts stores, and others – to maximize the use of our operating fleet while streamlining delivery in an affordable, reliable, and seamless way.”
New customer routes are first qualified with vehicles using safety drivers, in addition to being supervised by TeleAssist operators. System performance and road data are collected during every delivery to aid Faction in consistently improving its technology and further expanding its services for Cocola Bakery and future customers.
Founded in 2020, Faction plans to expand driverless deliveries past the San Francisco Bay Area in 2023 to other metro regions.
