JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A year after the German company Holon selected Jacksonville as its U.S. base for manufacturing autonomous transit shuttles, the company has finalized an agreement to commence construction of the plant next year. This will pave the way for the production of the first self-driving shuttles made in the United States.

In a recent announcement, Holon also revealed that Jacksonville will serve as the headquarters for its U.S. operations. The company aims to cement its position as a global leader in the production of autonomous transit vehicles, which are equipped with advanced technology to operate without a driver.

“The demand is virtually limitless,” said Holon’s Chief Financial Officer Clemens Rengier during an interview at the Jacksonville Transportation Authority headquarters. “It’s now up to us to meet that demand.”

While the construction timeline for the Jacksonville plant has been pushed back from the initial target of 2026, Holon plans to complete the $100 million facility and deliver the first electric-powered shuttles by the end of 2027.

Holon signed two agreements Oct. 27 during a Jacksonville Transportation Authority board meeting — an agreement with JTA for use of office space by Holon employees while the company builds the new plant, and a second agreement on a term sheet between Holon and InLight Real Estate Partners of Ponte Vedra for constructing the 580,000 square foot production facility in Eastport Industrial Park on the Northside.

When the transit shuttles start coming off the assembly line, some will hit the road in Jacksonville where JTA plans to deploy them in its Ultimate Urban Circulator program in downtown and eventually to surrounding neighborhoods.

Holon is looking far beyond Jacksonville for sales of its autonomous shuttles. Rengier said the plant will have the capacity to produce 5,000 autonomous shuttles per year and that would increase to 12,000 vehicles per year after adding a second shift of production workers.

“Public transit authorities and cities globally are seeking reliable autonomous shuttle solutions to meet growing mobility demands,” he said in remarks during the JTA board meeting. “Our manufacturing site here will position us to fill that global demand, shipping to Europe, the Middle East and hopefully soon Japan.”

The reference to Japan was a nod to a a delegation from the Tokyo-based Highway Industry Development Organization whose members filled several rows of seats in the JTA board room. The Japanese organization was in Jacksonville checking out the JTA command center for its autonomous vehicle shuttles.

In addition to the plant in Jacksonville, Holon plans to build a production facility in the Middle East and Europe.

Holon said in September 2024 it would build the Jacksonville plant in partnership with VanTrust on a site off Heckscher Drive. Since then, Holon entered into talks with InLight Real Estate Partners for the agreement that will construct the plant at Eastport Industrial Park.

Rengier said the configuration of Eastport Industrial Park offers more space for future expansion and also has direct access to rail for shipments across the U.S. while still offering easy access to the port for global shipments and the highway system.

He said while the plant is being built, Holon continues to put its prototype autonomous vehicle through the paces in Hamburg, Germany. Rengier said the electric-powered vehicle is designed to operate autonomously in mixed traffic, which is how JTA operates the first piece of its system on a Bay Street route in downtown.

“We don’t need separate lanes for us,” Rengier said. “If you look at Hamburg, for example, we’re driving in the middle of the city and I guess Hamburg is, from a complexity standpoint, bigger than Jacksonville. So that’s why we’re confident we can drive in pretty much any traffic globally.”

JTA is the first transit agency in the nation using autonomous shuttles in its regular fare-paying service, which has caused buzz about Jacksonville in the transit industry.

But on the ground, the Neighborhood Autonomous Vehicle Innovation service, called NAVI for short, has had declining ridership since JTA started it on June 30 by using retrofitted Ford E-Transit cargo vans until the Holon vehicles become available.

NAVI provided 3,215 rides in July on the route down Bay Street between the office towers of downtown and the sports complex. That averaged 146 riders per day for the service that operates from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday.

NAVI delivered 2,279 rides in August which averaged 128 passengers boarding the shuttles per day.

In September, NAVI gave 1,797 rides, or an average of 86 per day. That equates to about seven passengers per hour over a 12-hour day.

JTA began charging a $1.75 per trip fare on Oct. 1. Figures are not yet available for how that affected ridership in the month of October.

JTA CEO Nat Ford said the opening months of service give a snapshot of current ridership but NAVI will have more demand when projects such as the RISE Doro apartment building in the sports complex, the planned Museum of Science and History along Bay Street and other projects open near NAVI stops.

He said providing the transportation infrastructure “before the full wave of development isn’t a mistake” because it puts Jacksonville “ahead of the game by developing a state-of-the-art transportation network that will grow as those developments come online.”

“It’s easy to measure ridership today,” he told the JTA board. “It takes real leadership to measure readiness for the future.”

JTA used a $65 million mix of federal, state and agency funds to build the command center and create the Bay Street route where technology in the transit vehicles communicates with technology embedded along the road to guide the shuttles.

JTA also will pay up to $36.3 million over five years on the day-to-day operation of the service.

The shuttles currently travel their routes with drivers on board to take over operation of the vehicles as needed, such as in stretches where construction impacts a road lane.

The NAVI shuttles operated in the autonomous mode for 74% of the distance they traveled in September, which was up from 60% in August, said Greer Gillis, chief infrastructure and development officer for JTA.

“So we’re moving steadily toward our 90% target,” she told the JTA board.

She said there were “zero safety incidents” in September.

The Duval DOGE Committee of City Council plans to examine the projected expenses and ridership for future phases of the Ultimate Urban Circulator that would cost several hundred million dollars to build out.

City Council member Rory Diamond, who initiated the Duval DOGE review for its Nov. 4 meeting, has said the project is a boondoggle.

City Council member Rahman Johnson, the council’s liaison to JTA, told the agency’s board it would be short-sighted to pull the plug on expanding the use of autonomous vehicle technology in Jacksonville.

“What I know for sure is that NAVI is not a toy and that autonomous mobility is not a trend,” he said. “If it were just a trend or something that was innocuous, we wouldn’t have people from around the world looking at us.”

Editor’s note: This story was first published by our news partners, The Florida Times-Union.