Now that Grab and nuTonomy are teaming up for a test drive at One North, we’re one step closer to autonomous taxis on Singapore’s road – vehicles that can construct and navigate a visual map of the world by bouncing laser beams off their surroundings.
(And kudos to you who have identified that the main image is of Hong Kong :P)
Lidar country, here we come.
In this study, both companies benefit from the chance to peek over the other’s shoulder.
NuTonomy tapped into Grab’s tech knowhow for “routing, managing supply and demand, mapping and more”, while Grab got to glean insight into the state of autonomous vehicle technology from nuTonomy – and of course a select group of lucky Grab users got the eerie experience of being chauffeured by an invisible driver.
And there’s more to come. NuTonomy aims to roll out their autonomous fleet of “robo” taxis by 2018, while Grab is also interested to join the race in the long term. As automated systems plummet in price (from US$75,000 to a few hundred dollars), and people grow more comfortable with the idea of a driver in the dashboard, will ComfortDelGro and SMRT feel the pressure to go “full auto” or fall out of the race?
Neither decision is without cost. Continuing to employ drivers may weaken the company’s image once self-driving technology delivers on its promise to provide safer roads free of human error. Switching to self-driving technology however could put tens of thousands of Singapore cabbies out of the job. When Uber and Lyft announced their plans to do that, the online reaction wasn’t pretty.
By estimates though, a truly autonomous car is still several years in the future (Ford is planning for a 2021 release, while China’s Baidu is aiming for 2019), giving taxi uncles and taxi companies some time to work out how to ride the wave of change.
And taxis gaining autopilot might just be the first ripple. No one knows for sure, but successful (and profitable) automated taxis are likely to motivate other companies to embrace self-driving vehicles and to replace other vehicle drivers (think bus, truck, delivery and postal services).
Driverless taxis? That’s the first stop, with more on the way.
By Vincent Tan
