Singapore has just made international news again (and it’s not about Joseph Schooling) after autonomous vehicle software startup nuTonomy announced that they’d be rolling out a public trial of self-driving taxis right here—the first in the world—beating Uber which planned to offer a similar service in the United States.
The trial is currently by invitation only, so pull whatever strings you have to. At the moment, a selected group of 10 people have been using nuTonomy’s ride-hailing smartphone app to get to around. This ongoing trial is currently confined to 12 different locations in the one-north business district, including the Mediacorp Campus and the Genome building, which are along a 6km stretch of road.
During this trial, an engineer will sit in the test vehicles, a Renault Zoe and Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric car, for all rides to observe the system’s performance to to take over if anything goes south.
They’re still collecting data on the software’s system performance, vehicle routing efficiency, booking process and the overall passenger service, which will be used to make tweaks before the commercial launch in 2018. Sounds like a great idea but with accidents happening with other self-driving cars like the Tesla, we’ll take a backseat on this one and see how it rides out before trying it out.
