Beep's Toby McGraw draws on family roots in equestrian customer service to shape new autonomous transportation options for underserved populations.
From about the age of six, McGraw recalls, he tried to mimic his dad's natural ability to listen to his customers––the shop catered to everyone from well-heeled owners of expensive horses to horse groomers and trainers to weekend equestrians––and bring extra value to the discussion.
"I remember thinking, 'We're not selling to anyone. We're just asking our customers questions and trying to qualify what they need,'" he offers. "Then we're showing them the saddle, the bit, the pair of boots or whatever they needed. It was a simple matter of 'How can we help you? How can we be of service?'"
Addressing Critical Needs
Today, as the chief revenue officer for Beep, an Orlando, Fla.-based provider of shared autonomous mobility services, McGraw is helping private and public communities, campuses and airports deploy fleets of autonomous, all-electric shuttles to enable citizens to run errands or make critical first-mile/last-mile connections to public and private transit.
"Beep's shared, autonomous networks are solving for four critical factors in urban transportation," he explains.
Reducing congestion:
We're replacing personal vehicles and TNC (Uber and Lyft) rides that currently create competition and congestion at the curb with one or more 10-to-16-passenger vehicles;
Reducing emissions
By using all-electric vehicles, we're serving as good stewards of the environment while developing smart, cost-effective ways to stage and maintain electric-charging stations;
Improving transit accessibility
We're driving ridership into the public transit ecosystem by focusing on the needs of people who live in transit deserts or those who need a little bit of extra assistance (due to hearing, vision or mobility impairments) getting to public transit stops and
Ensuring road safety
We're making sure our passengers feel just as safe when an autonomous bus approaches their stop as they would feel making eye contact with the human driver of a conventional city bus.
Leaning in on Technology
Despite his family's focus on horses, McGraw was attracted in high school to "technology-forward" subjects including teaching himself how to take apart and fix desktop computers.
"Aside from tech and business classes, I found math and physics to be the most interesting subjects," he admits, an aptitude that would serve him well during the early stages of his career.
When he matriculated at the University of Southern California, McGraw veered briefly into the foreign service lane, majoring in international relations. Upon graduation in 2004, however, he returned to his geographic roots—Elkhart is known as the "RV Capital of the World—taking a job as a West Coast regional sales manager with Elkhart-based Forest River Inc., the largest RV maker in the world.
Driving Down Inefficiencies
After brief stops at Forest River and Accuride International, a manufacturer of commercial-grade cabinet hardware, McGraw discovered his passion—and aptitude—for transportation systems.
At Zonar Systems, he applied his interest in math and physics to the company's work in commercial vehicle telematics, the "smart" process of gathering and analyzing data about the location, speed, etc., of fleets of vehicles to help reduce costs and improve their safety and performance.
"I got very good at quantifying (fleet) inefficiencies around things like idling," he says. "How much money is that idling costing us in fuel costs? What is it doing to greenhouse gases? And how much is it costing us in labor that's not serving our primary mission?"
Delivering Kids to a Better Life
At HopSkipDrive, a ridesharing company that serves students with specialized transportation needs and older adults, McGraw helped identify inefficiencies in how the company deployed its fleet of school buses.
"We were thinking about issues such as 'Why are we sending an empty school bus 40 miles each way to pick up one child versus using a smaller vehicle to meet that requirement and using a larger bus to pick up more kids closer to school?'" he explains. "How might these deployment strategies affect school attendance or funding available to schools?"
During his five-and-a-half-year tenure, McGraw helped HopSkipDrive’s founders grow the company from two markets to 26 markets nationwide, serving some of the nation's largest school districts in Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Detroit.
"We discovered a tremendous need to support riders above and beyond general education riders on large buses," he notes. "We focused on the students that had the highest levels of need. There were students experiencing homelessness, students in foster care, and students with individual education plans that all called for individualized transport to and from school. It was great to be involved with filling specific needs in a rapidly evolving transportation sector."
In 2023, however, Beep came calling and McGraw has been with the autonomous mobility provider ever since.
Piloting the Future
Today, Beep is in a transition phase of sorts. Over the past five years, the company has installed autonomous, fixed-route, defined-headway shuttle pilot programs in locations such as Yellowstone Park, Wyo.; Truist Park, the Atlanta Braves baseball stadium; and the City of Orlando.
The company has also tested its autonomous, all-electric vehicle networks extensively in Lake Nona, Fla., a 17-square-mile, master-planned community developed by the Tavistock Development Company.
"Our vehicles have been operating in and around Lake Nona continuously for the past six years," McGraw says. "Our vehicles help connect residential areas of their community to the town center, its hotel areas, various medical facilities and several higher education campuses within Lake Nona."
To ensure safety and help Beep gain confidence in its network technology, pilot shuttles currently operate at speeds of 10-15 mph in limited (geofenced) areas. The vehicles are each monitored from a central command center in Lake Nona, carry a safety attendant on board and operate autonomously from storage and charging facilities near their routes. Customers can use the RideBeep app to see when and where the next vehicle will arrive.
Coupling Convenience with Cool
But do customers truly care whether their shuttle service is autonomous or not? Maybe, or maybe not, admits McGraw.
"Don't just play the game, change the game."
Toby McGraw, Beep
"In the short term, autonomy is rather interesting to consumers," he explains. "In the same way that LA visitors enjoy the novelty of using Waymo driverless cars to get around, Beep autonomous vehicles provide safety, efficiency and a 'cool factor' that may help bring new riders into the public transit ecosystem. Over the long term, riders will appreciate the safe and dependable experience they'll get from using shared autonomous vehicles."
Building Community Confidence
So far, most of Beep's pilot programs have used non-purpose-built shuttles produced by companies such as Navya and Local Motors.
And while these vehicles are all-electric and ADA-accessible, they do not meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards or the "Buy America" requirement now included in many federally funded transportation infrastructure projects.
"Getting a purpose-built vehicle is absolutely a requirement for us to scale up our business in the U.S." McGraw emphasizes.
Creating Momentum
Which is why Beep began collaborating in the early 2020s with HOLON, the autonomous vehicle division of Austrian chassis-component manufacturer Benteler. At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2023, Benteler unveiled its new HOLON Mover vehicle and announced plans to collaborate with Beep to create an autonomous Mover project in the U.S.
In Sept. 2024, HOLON announced plans to build a 500,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Jacksonville, Fla. to produce up to 5,000 Mover vehicles per year. The company expects to begin rolling vehicles off its assembly line in 2026.
Starting with Smiles
Beep plans to scale up its HOLON-based mobility services initially in so-called "smile" (warm-weather) states such as California, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and potentially Texas.
And while the autonomous driving technology is relatively mature, McGraw observes, Beep vehicles—the company plans to deploy a 15-passenger version initially—will still have to deal with the uncertainties of human driving behavior and regional cultural differences in how people manage traffic engagements.
"I've been on Beep vehicles and seen some rather perplexing human driving behavior," he asserts. "How do you ensure that your vehicle is as safe as possible and not disrupting the flow of human drivers? And how do you account for regional differences such as Seattle, which loves a good turn signal, or New York City, where drivers will never let you merge into traffic if you're only using your turn signal?"
Maintaining Discipline
Workdays for McGraw begin early in the four-bedroom house he shares with his wife and two school-aged boys in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles.
"I'm definitely a daily exercise person," he says. "It's something I do religiously, no matter how early I have to get up (to be on the road by 6:30 a.m.). It's something I really need to center myself."
After exercising his mind and body, McGraw turns to fixing breakfast for his boys, chatting them up and dropping them off at school. He travels about 50% of the time, so meals with his family are special. When he's home in Los Angeles, his commute is quite short—just down the hall to his home office—a routine born during the COVID pandemic that he's still getting used to.
"I miss those natural 35-40 minute breaks that used to be a part of my office commute routine," he laments. "I try to get out and get some sunshine periodically; otherwise, it's easy to be heads-down and working for 10 to 11 hours."
Mobilizing the Future
Looking ahead, McGraw is excited about the work that he and Beep are doing to bring clean, new public transit options to all types of communities, especially those with specific accessibility needs.
"As a society, we have to do a better job of supporting people who need to move around," he observes. "Access to mobility is access to opportunity, and access to life."
And while the autonomous mobility market is ripe with competition and evolving rules of engagement, McGraw is determined to not just "play the game but rather to change the game."
"I constantly remind my Beep sales team that the mobility solution we're developing has never been done before and certainly never at scale," he says. "We're not going to do everything right the first time, but we owe it to the communities we're serving to keep grinding forward and to keep delivering safe, clean, reliable mobility options to give them a lift up whenever we can."
# # #
If you enjoyed this article on Toby McGraw, Beep and autonomous mobility, I think you’ll enjoy my look at LA’s planned “Transit-First Olympics,” and Lion Electric’s efforts to use clean, all-electric school buses to restore student transportation systems to good health. If you have ideas for other profile subjects for this blog, please send your suggestions to me at brooks@personsofinfrastructure.com. Many thanks.
Comments