Yes, these limitations make the whole driverless thing much less sexy. No, this is not the self-driving future you have been awaiting. But it’s the one that’s here now, and May Mobility has good reason to be creating it.

Market research firm IBIS World estimates the “scheduled and chartered bus service” industry took in $5 billion last year. Malek says May could aim to target the half of US trips that are 3 miles or less. A handful of other companies have flocked to this opportunity: Optimus Ride operates a service on Boston’s Seaport, and within a planned community outside the city. France’s Navya just wrapped up a free, year-long shuttle demonstration in Las Vegas. Since October, Drive.ai has been running three vehicles along a few routes in Arlington, Texas. Still other shuttles are testing in even more controlled environments, like college campuses or dedicated testing grounds.

Which means companies like May might make some money—and garner it plenty of experience with what humans want out of a self-driving car—while they wait for the technology to catch up with that greatest promise, the go-anywhere-anytime robo-car. And that is the long-term goal, Olson makes clear. On one wall in his company’s office, the team has hung three banners, which you might call targets. They read Waymo, Uber, and Cruise.

Unsexy Education

Like every other city on the planet, Detroit is occasionally messy. When I rode in a May vehicle this summer, it had to stop—smoothly—for a toddler-toting man who stepped into the middle of the street. When a cyclist shot out of the Jimmy John’s sandwich shop against traffic, the May shuttle made a wide sweep around him. (“We see that guy all the time,” one employee told me.) A few times, the human operator took the shuttle’s T-bar steering wheel and did the driving: once because it needed to cross a double yellow line to swerve around a parked car, and once after the vehicle braked hard for a yellow light.

That messiness is one reason May says it’s testing in busy, complicated urban centers and not, as Olson puts it, “just a sleepy suburb of Phoenix.” (That’s a dig at Waymo.) And yet, that safety operator’s presence makes something clear: May is cheating, just a bit.

It plans to keep safety drivers—or attendants—in its vehicles for an indefinite period, to keep riders safe and informed about how the technology works. Its geographic reach is measly. In Detroit, five vehicles run that single one-mile route, which has been mapped and remapped to make sure the vehicles can pull it off. The company’s Rhode Island deployment, which will happen in stages starting early next year, will be its longest route yet, around 5 miles. The vehicles are slow too, with top speeds of 25 mph.

And May uses what others in the industry see as a faux pas: sensors that live outside the shuttle, which the company mounts on traffic lights. These constantly send info, like street light color, to its vehicles, helping guide them on their path. Other autonomous vehicle developers say such help shouldn’t be necessary. “From an infrastructure standpoint we really don’t need a lot,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik told a group of governors in July. “We can’t become reliant on it at Waymo because sometimes it’s not going to work.”

May thinks such pretensions are bunk. “Let’s use what works in robotics today and go solve transportation problems, because that will allow us to learn more, quickly, and to scale more quickly,” says Malek. What she means is: Let’s do what we can now, learn from it, and make some moolah along the way. Documents provided by Ohio’s DOT show that May won its one-year Columbus with a $547,750 bid, $150,000 less than its closest competitor. Rhode Island’s government will kick in at least $800,000 for its one-year contract with May. (Some of that money comes from a federal transit pot.) These are not huge checks, but they’re something.

Speed Bumps

Still, the road is less than smooth for autonomous shuttle operators like May. In August, the Department of Transportation published a report on the sector, pointing to limited vehicle capabilities, opposition from labor, procurement complications, and the unpredictability of local regulations, politics, and funding as issues that low-speed, self-driving shuttles must conquer before becoming ubiquitous. “The market is small, and many companies in this space have little experience designing and validating systems and producing vehicles, compared to traditional automakers,” the report’s authors wrote.