During the trials, the cars will have drivers behind the wheel to take over if the piloting systems fail.
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Delphi will conduct a trial of an urban, point-to-point, low-speed, autonomous, mobility-on-demand service in Singapore’s Autonomous Vehicles Test Bed located at one-north, a business park in the western area of the city. This service will work similar to the ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft.
Delphi Motors is scheduled to release a pilot project for self-driven taxis in Singapore early next year.
He thinks that they can significantly reduce the fares to about USD90 cents a mile (around SGD$1.2o) with an automated vehicle.
Delphi is working with other companies, including Israel’s Mobileye NV, to develop the sensor systems to enable vehicles to operate autonomously, and the Singapore Land Transit Authority will supply infrastructure to help the vehicles navigate safely. The country’s Land Transport Authority selected Delphi to lead the pilot program after hearing of the supplier’s 2015 coast-to-coast drive in an autonomous vehicle and driving with them around Mountain View, California. First, there are only six vehicles in the autonomous fleet. “Developing a cloud-based software servicing capability integrated with the vehicle creates an end-to-end solution that will eventually allow our existing, and many potential new customers, the ability to enter emerging mobility markets”. Nevertheless, Delphi plans to remove drivers from the equation by 2019 or 2020. For example, someone could request the driverless auto stop to pick up milk from the grocery or shirts from the dry cleaners, before it picks the passenger up.
“We are going to do it incrementally in a very controlled manner”, he said. Delphi plans to deploy similar pilot programs in Europe and North America as well, potentially selecting a USA site as soon as this year.
Delphi will determine the riders who get to participate in the program, but acknowledges that at some point during the pilot regular commuters will have to experience it.
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Delphi teamed up with the Singapore Land Transit Authority (LTA) for this project, which could prove to be the fastest route toward making this technology viable from a commercial point of view.
