Autonomous Vehicle Kick Off Event

Target Audience: The target audience for this event was community leaders and elected officials in the Tri-Valley, which is comprised of the East Bay communities of Dublin, Pleasanton and Livermore, California. The Livermore Amador Valley Transit Authority (LAVTA) was kicking off testing of its new shared autonomous vehicle (SAV) and the kick off event offered the opportunity to showcase and explain the safety features of this new driverless technology and highlight the need for additional resources to expand the availability of SAV's.

Strategy Objective:The strategy was to hold a kickoff event that would be attended by a small invited group of local elected officials and business and community leaders to unveil LAVTA's new autonomous vehicle and offer many people their first opportunity to ride on a vehicle running in autonomous mode with no driver. The event also served as a media event to showcase some of the innovative projects being undertaken by our agency.

Situation Challenge: There were many challenges associated with staging this event. Our vehicle was scheduled for delivery in late May, so the date of June 22 was selected to coordinate schedules of the four elected officials speaking at the event and to provide some cushion for late delivery of the vehicle from France. The delivery was delayed by Customs and left us with less than 14 days to wrap the vehicle, get it licensed and program its autonomous feature so it could legally be operated on city streets in autonomous mode for the event. Less than a week before the event, we were informed that only trained SAV operators and official testers were allowed to ride in the vehicle. To meet this requirement we redesigned our name tags to designate each attendee as an "Official Autonomous Vehicle Tester".

Results Impact: The event was attended by more than 70 invitees and was covered by all four San Francisco network television stations, as well as area newspapers. The event was the cover story for Passenger Transport's "New Mobility Paradigm" edition and was covered by all major national transit publications. These photos of the event show the high level of interest and enthusiasm of those in attendance: (copy and paste in your web browser to see folder of photos) https://drive.google.com/open?id=1L5DmVwg1ObxNVvyWkqkBd654CFOOi876

Why Submit: This event should win an award because of the many obstacles that were overcome and the resulting event which was well received by those in attendance and well covered by local and national media.