Currently, only six autonomous vehicles have been deployed and these will be available only in Singapore’s Autonomous Vehicles Test Bed, a four-mile route located at one-north, a business park in the city’s western area.
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According to The Verge, the service will use three fixed routes for six autonomous Audi SQ5s.
Besides providing the driverless vehicles, Delphi will develop software that lets commuters call them. AVs provide the opportunity to facilitate efficient urban and suburban vehicle sharing, autonomous bus or taxi services, logistics and long-distance truck platooning.
Delphi already has an autonomous fleet in Silicon Valley and demonstrated a coast-to-coast autonomous drive of the United States past year.
Glen DeVos, The Vice-President of Delphi’s Service Business Unit, says “The Company is hoping to come up with the “last mile” solution by building the entire ecosystem including the auto and communication systems between the vehicles and the infrastructure, transactions, security and the cloud services”. “You have to get the technology to work first, but you also have to implement it in a way that the end consumer feels comfortable and actually excited about using”.
If Singapore’s Autonomous Mobility on Demand pilot goes as planned, however, the cars could appear for the customer sans driver before the end of the decade.
“This puts it on the ground”, says DeVos, whose group forecasts fully autonomous cars in the 2020 timeframe.
The automotive supplier, whose operational headquarters are in Auburn Hills, Mich., said its technology is “vehicle agnostic and can be applied to passenger cars, commercial vehicles, trucks and goal built mobility pods” for people or cargo.
However, Delphi Vice President Glen DeVos, who as a 25-year veteran of the supplier epitomizes its transformation through his job as head of a newly organized Silicon Valley-based business-services unit, admits financial gains from being the winning selection will be few. For example, someone could request the driverless vehicle stop to pick up milk from the grocery or shirts from the dry cleaners, before it picks the passenger up.
Delphi said the pilot program will allow them to capture a large amount of data and experiment with how they use it. The company plans to roll out the service for Europe and North America.
Singapore has become a prime destination to test self-driving systems. By 2022, the Singapore Land Transit Authority hopes the driverless fleet will become a regular part of Singapore’s transport system.
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As with the SQ5, the six vehicles Delphi will equip with sensors, cameras and a technology known as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), will have steering wheels and pedals for acceleration and braking. Delphi mapped the routes itself.
