Note that this isn't autonomous vehicles, yet. But it's one step towards cars-as-a-service, which is important part of improving transport and making it more sustainable....
A new on-demand car-hailing service using remote-controlled driverless vehicles has been launched in Milton Keynes by UK start-up Imperium Drive.
Note that this isn't autonomous vehicles, yet. But it's one step towards cars-as-a-service, which is important part of improving transport and making it more sustainable. Buses/trams/bikes/walking/etc are great but for the x% of time I really a car for point-to-point reasons, being able to hail a car for temporary use would be very helpful thing. Although to be honest I'd probably be slightly more interested in vans-as-a-service because a few times a year I want to be able to shift some heavy/bulky stuff. But anyway.
It looks like an interesting approach to resource optimisation: remote control the car to the user, and then let the user drive themselves. You can feasibly have one staff member covering tens of...
It looks like an interesting approach to resource optimisation: remote control the car to the user, and then let the user drive themselves. You can feasibly have one staff member covering tens of cars, and each car being used by tens of people per day, without the overheads of a taxi or the parking & downtime constraints of a personal car for every driver. I imagine not having it driverless when the user is inside will help with early acceptance a bit, too, although I don't imagine it changes the liability question - not that remote control with the passenger in there would make as much sense compared to a normal taxi anyway.
I do wonder how autonomous it's capable of being in remote mode. There's a delicate balance right now around compensating for the reduced perception while not doing so much that the remote driver completely zones out. The article says "The operating system uses computer image algorithms to detect anything near the car." so presumably it's doing something to act on that data, but I'm not sure how much; given the way the business describes themselves, I wonder if it's already full auto and just has a person there for legal reasons - gather X amount of miles' worth of data now, and then take that back to the government and say "our remote drivers only intervened 0.00...% of the time, you may as well let us get rid of them".
Note that this isn't autonomous vehicles, yet. But it's one step towards cars-as-a-service, which is important part of improving transport and making it more sustainable. Buses/trams/bikes/walking/etc are great but for the x% of time I really a car for point-to-point reasons, being able to hail a car for temporary use would be very helpful thing. Although to be honest I'd probably be slightly more interested in vans-as-a-service because a few times a year I want to be able to shift some heavy/bulky stuff. But anyway.
It looks like an interesting approach to resource optimisation: remote control the car to the user, and then let the user drive themselves. You can feasibly have one staff member covering tens of cars, and each car being used by tens of people per day, without the overheads of a taxi or the parking & downtime constraints of a personal car for every driver. I imagine not having it driverless when the user is inside will help with early acceptance a bit, too, although I don't imagine it changes the liability question - not that remote control with the passenger in there would make as much sense compared to a normal taxi anyway.
I do wonder how autonomous it's capable of being in remote mode. There's a delicate balance right now around compensating for the reduced perception while not doing so much that the remote driver completely zones out. The article says "The operating system uses computer image algorithms to detect anything near the car." so presumably it's doing something to act on that data, but I'm not sure how much; given the way the business describes themselves, I wonder if it's already full auto and just has a person there for legal reasons - gather X amount of miles' worth of data now, and then take that back to the government and say "our remote drivers only intervened 0.00...% of the time, you may as well let us get rid of them".