Google, Apple, Tesla, Ford, Honda: For major players in the autonomous vehicle race, 2020 has emerged as the target date. A few have indicated they’ll have products ready to go sooner than that, but with government regulators scrambling to keep up, it’s unlikely you, as a member of the public, will have an opportunity to climb aboard much earlier. In December, draft regulations released in tech-heavy California suggested the state might soon allow autonomous vehicles to operate on roads—but only if a licensed driver remains behind the wheel.

Which is why campuses are so exciting to people like Alex Rodrigues, a co-founder of Varden Labs. His company, and others producing driverless shuttles like it (there are a few of them), see inroads on university, office, and assisted living campuses where streets are shielded from many of the inconveniences of government oversight.

Varden Labs got its start on a $35,000 grant, hardly Google money. But since summer 2015, Rodrigues and his team have been tinkering with autonomous golf carts on university campuses—first at the University Waterloo, where they were students, now on a five-college California tour that will take them from Sacramento State to UCLA. Their current model’s name is Alvin. Hello, Alvin:

It’s not only about regulations. Campuses are “controlled environments,” Rodrigues says. You’re going to get fewer cop car chases, motorcycles, heavy vehicle traffic, the stuff that can make roads unpredictable and dangerous. By the same token, an autonomous vehicle built to function on campuses will have to supremely pedestrian-friendly, and very, very slow. “It’s the much lower speed that allows us to make the vehicles a lot safer,” Rodrigues says. In terms of software, constrained campuses are easier, too: there’s just less data to load into the navigation system.