STAR Pods careers

STAR Pods is creating a practical PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) mass transit system. The system will use small single-person vehicles to transport people between stations autonomously and non-stop at 75 mph on an elevated track. A person would normally walk to a nearby station, walk up stairs to a small station platform, get into a vehicle waiting there, tell it where they're going, and it would take them to the closest station without stops at any other station.

The key economic factor here is weight. The lighter the vehicles, the less expensive the track infrastructure.

The system itself consists of two primary parts:
* The guideway is a set of tracks suspended at least 30 feet above the ground by support poles. When a guideway needs to cross perpendicular across the path of another, one of the guideways is raised above the other in a simple overpass so that there is never any intersections in the guideway network.
* Vehicles are self-driving and electric. They'll be able to carry up to 285 lbs and use around 1/10th the energy of a car (even an electric car) because of its much smaller frontal area.

When deployed, the system is expected to cost approximately $10 million per mile, have a maintenance cost of approximately 2 cents per mile, with market-rate fares of between 15 and 35 cents/mile. The system will be profitable without subsidies, making the company much less reliant on government than other mass transit, leading to lower risk.

We're seeking a seed investment of $500,000 - $3 million. The lower end would speed up our ability to fill out our founding team with people of the necessary skill sets, while the higher end would allow us to design, build, and test a working scale model of the system. After the R&D phase, ultimately we'll need investment on the order of $250 million to build a 20 mile pilot system.