Your future autonomous ride could be aboard a bus — step inside and you won’t find a driver in sight. May Mobility, which develops self-driving technology, is partnering with European electric minibus manufacturer Tecnobus to build an autonomous vehicle that’ll seat up to 30 passengers, the companies announced at CES on Tuesday. The planned minibus will also be wheelchair-accessible and can go up to 45 mph.
May Mobility says this collaboration will allow it to scale and diversify its fleets for everything from urban and airport transit to corporate campus transportation. It’ll also allow the company to expand the reach of its self-driving technology into Europe and Canada, where the buses are currently approved for use.
The move toward developing autonomous buses could help address rising concerns about congestion in cities, especially as robotaxis increasingly join the throngs of vehicles already on roads. Critics have noted that autonomous vehicles will likely worsen traffic by roaming downtown areas as they wait for their next pickup. The way May Mobility sees it, having a set of smaller public transit vehicles will enable cities to deploy more buses they can actually fill — without shelling out more money for additional drivers, which would otherwise make the endeavor cost-prohibitive.
“A larger number of smaller vehicles provides lower wait times, more direct routes to your destination, a more customizable experience,” Edwin Olson, May Mobility’s CEO and founder, told me during an interview. “But to the transit planner, there’s not budget to hire all these drivers. This is what autonomous vehicles do: They allow us to create this service for public transit that will help out-compete personal car ownership.”
Further down the road, Olson added, “If we get enough personal car owners to start using public transit, or vehicles that are integrated into public transit like May, then you can start to transform the way cities are built,” noting the proliferation of roads, parking structures, street noise and congestion. “Where we’re headed is we can carry more people with fewer vehicles, do it at a much higher level of safety and give people their cities back.”
The first May Mobility-Tecnobus autonomous minibuses are slated to be road-ready in the first half of 2026, the companies say, with the goal of being deployed later that year.
The autonomous vehicle (AV) space is nascent but slowly expanding, as companies like Alphabet-owned Waymo and Amazon-owned Zoox scale in more cities. Startups like Avride and Nuro are also developing robotaxi and autonomous delivery services, and traditional ride hailing companies Uber and Lyft are pining for a piece of the potentially lucrative pie by teaming up with AV companies. (Lyft, for instance, has a partnership with May Mobility.)
Still, the road ahead is long and filled with regulatory hurdles, high costs and a skeptical general public. Self-driving vehicles have been in their fair share of headline-making incidents, from collisions with bikers and pedestrians, to incidents in which they drive the wrong way. Still, these companies have touted the safety of their respective vehicles and technology – especially in comparison to human drivers. In fact, companies like Waymo and Zoox (and previously, Cruise) have suggested that driverless tech could actually curb deaths and injuries on the road by ensuring vehicles are doing exactly what they need to, without distraction.
For its part, May Mobility says its Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) technology uses AI to run real-time simulations and analyze thousands of scenarios per second, before choosing the best course of action. This allows the vehicles to handle unpredictable situations and drive safely, according to the company. And like other self-driving vehicles from Waymo and Zoox, May Mobility uses lidar, radar and cameras to navigate roads without a driver.
May Mobility has also deployed its robotaxis, which operate using autonomous Toyota Sienna minivans, in cities including Ann Arbor, Michigan; Arlington, Texas; Detroit, Michigan; and Miami, Florida.
One of the key features that makes May Mobility stand apart from competitors is that its vehicles are designed to be wheelchair-accessible. (Cruise, before being shuttered by owner General Motors in December, had also unveiled a wheelchair-accessible self-driving vehicle in 2023 called Wav, but that never saw the light of day.)
“It’s always been part of what we’ve invested in, to make sure that that’s available to our customers,” Olson said. “It’s also good business, because if you want to provide transportation as part of a public transit infrastructure, you need to be able to support everybody.”
It’ll be some time before the autonomous minibuses hit roads in 2026. Until then, robotaxis, whether in the form of May Mobility’s Toyota Siennas or Zoox’s pod-like vehicles, are sure to keep observers intrigued, until the next big thing rolls into town.
Watch this: This Robotaxi Looks and Drives Like No Car You’ve Ever Seen Before