When Buses Drive Themselves: The Quiet AV Revolution

Rick L'Amie
4 days ago
3 min read

What If Autonomous Vehicles Solved the Right Problem?

A conversation with Eran Ofir, CEO of Imagry

You've probably seen a Waymo by now. Maybe in San Francisco, or Phoenix, or Austin — a white SUV gliding through traffic with no one behind the wheel. It's striking. It's a little unsettling. And it raises an obvious question: is this the future of transportation?

Eran Ofir thinks we're asking the wrong question.

Ofir is the CEO of Imagry, an autonomous driving software company founded in Haifa, Israel. He joined me on Transportopia this week for a conversation that reframed everything I thought I knew about where autonomous vehicles are headed — and who they're actually for.

The problem with robotaxis

Here's what Eran said that stopped me cold: robotaxis, for all the attention and investment they attract, don't solve any of the core problems facing urban transportation. They don't address the global bus driver shortage. They don't reduce congestion. Research suggests they may make it worse, adding more vehicles circling city streets carrying one or two passengers at a time. And they do nothing for the communities that need transit most. Imagry went a different direction. Their software drives full-size public transit buses, on real public roads, in real traffic using nothing but cameras and AI. No laser sensors. No detailed pre-built maps. No cloud connection. Eight cameras, a distributed network of neural networks, and a system that makes decisions three times faster than a human driver. One bus. Up to forty passengers. That's a different kind of math.

How it works

The system Eran describes is genuinely unlike anything else in the autonomous vehicle space. Most AV companies build exhaustive digital maps of every road they operate on and can only drive within those tightly defined areas. Imagry's vehicles build a live understanding of the road as they drive, the same way a human does. Eran told me a story that captures it better than any technical explanation. One of their buses, driving on a highway, encountered a piano that had fallen off a moving truck. The system had never been trained to detect a piano. It handled it anyway. In Frankfurt, another vehicle encountered a child on a sled in the snow — also never trained for.

The driver shortage nobody's talking about

There is a global bus driver shortage, and it is getting worse. Eran cited roughly a 20% shortfall worldwide, growing annually. In Japan, 40% of bus drivers are projected to retire within the next ten years. In the US, the American Public Transportation Association found that 71% of transit agencies have already cut or delayed service because they can't find enough drivers. Routes are being cancelled. Frequencies are being cut. Communities that depend on transit. Older riders, people without cars, workers in low-income neighborhoods are losing service. Autonomous buses don't replace drivers. They fill the gap where no driver exists.

Coming to the US

Imagry has been operating autonomously on public roads since 2019 in Germany, Israel, Japan, and in test operations in California. And Eran shared something on this episode that hasn't been widely reported: their first live US transit deployments are coming before the end of this year. Florida first. Nevada next. City shuttle service, M2 vans, contracted by municipalities, running on public roads. That's a bus in an American city with no one behind the wheel moving people who need to get somewhere.

Watch it for yourself

Before you listen to this episode, or right after — go watch Imagry's demo footage of an autonomous bus navigating real city traffic. No test track. No closed course. Real intersections, real pedestrians, real conditions.

Listen to the full episode

Eran and I cover AV technology, the US regulatory landscape, what autonomous transit does to the city in twenty years, and why the industry — in his words — spent a decade solving the wrong problem.

Transportopia — the intersection of transportation and utopia. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or right here on Transportopia.org.