Earlier this year, nuTonomy was the first company to get permission from the Singapore government to test self-driving cars in a small area of the town. Select residents from Singapore will be invited to use the new “robo-taxis” via the company’s app, with no charge for the rides.
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One-north business district is the same location where Nutonomy has been doing test trials since April this year using a modified Mitsubishi iMiev auto and a Renault Zoe.
The self-driving taxis comes from NuTonomy -a three year old start up that develops autonomous vehicle software.
NuTonomy said it would test its vehicles on a six-kilometer route. For the trial runs, an engineer is seated behind the steering wheel to keep a tab on the system, monitor it, and take control if required.
nuTonomy, formed by former MIT researchers, modified several iMiEV and Zoe line vehicles from manufacturers Mitsubishi and Renault respectively and will offer rides for the public.
The nuTonomy service is in Singapore and has just six cars.
Only riders with invitations can participate. Companies like Tesla and Google have been pouring massive investments into autonomous-vehicle technology and striving to come up with a viable self-driving auto.
It’s also in a country the size of a small city, Singapore, and then in a small business district of that city, a city state with very ordered traffic and roads and one where private cars are limited in number due to enormous taxation.
Doug Parker, COO at nuTonomy, said “Autonomous taxis could ultimately reduce the number of cars on Singapore’s roads from 900,000 to 300,000.When you are able to take that many cars off the road, it creates a lot of possibilities”. Others have already tested the cars on public roads in the US and many other countries. “You can create smaller roads, you can create much smaller auto parks”, Parker said.
Ride-sharing giant Uber said last week that it would be launching driverless cars in the United States city of Pittsburgh by the end of August.
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Karl Iagnemma, chief executive and co-founder of nuTonomy, was quoted as saying in a media release: “nuTonomy’s first-in-the-world public trial is a direct reflection of the level of maturity that we have achieved with our AV software system”.
