Self-Driving Taxis in Singapore Begin Trial Run: Commercial Launch in 2018
Self-driving taxis in Singapore have been deployed on trial mode with a full scale commercial launch in 2018 according to a report by Fortune.
Nutonomy
The self-driving taxis comes from NuTonomy -a three year old start up that develops autonomous vehicle software. The company began from world-renowned engineering university Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and eventually ventured out independently.
Limited Trial
The public trial of self-driving taxis commenced on Thursday, August 25. The company launched a promotional video of people's experiences riding the car in YouTube.
The public trial involved select Singapore citizens who can call the self-driving taxis using a mobile app from Nutonomy. The self-driving taxis will only service Singapore's one-north business district and no other streets.
One-north business district is the same location where Nutonomy has been doing test trials since April this year using a modified Mitsubishi iMiev car and a Renault Zoe.
Engineer Assistance
Inside the car, the passenger will be accompanied by a Nutonomy engineer who will observe the vehicle's performance and, if needed, take control of the car. He will gather data for Nutonomy during the trial using the collected data to improve the car's self-driving software.
Beating Giants
The much smaller Nutonomy has beaten giants like Google, Ford, Apple, and Uber who all have invested enormous amounts of cash and technological resources over several years to create a viable commercial self-driving taxi service.
Google has been working on self-driving cars since 2009 and they only plan to launch commercialized self-driving cars in 2020. In August of this year, Volvo partnered with Uber to create self-driving vehicles, a partnership that was worth $300 million dollars. Ford boldly declared that by year 2021 it will be ready to launch self-driving cars for ride-sharing purposes. GM Motors invested $500 million dollars to ride-hailing company Lyft.
Despite Nutonomy's size it was able to do what its bigger rivals couldn't do that is to launch a self-driving taxi that ordinary people can actually ride and use.
