Self-Driving Taxis Hit the Road in Singapore
August 25 2016 - 4:30AM
Dow Jones News
SINGAPORE—Singapore became the first country in the world to
launch a self-driving taxi service on Thursday, beating
ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc. by mere days to public
road tests of a technology that could revolutionize the transport
industry.
The trial, although small, illustrates how intense the global
race to develop autonomous driving vehicles has become. The field
has traditionally been dominated by U.S. tech giants like Uber and
Alphabet Inc.'s Google.
Singapore's nuTonomy, founded by two researchers from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Thursday it began
testing a free taxi-hailing service in a small business district in
Singapore called one-north, a campus-like space dominated by tech
firms and biotechnology companies. Other tech companies including
Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc. have been testing self-driving
cars on the roads for years, but this is the first time the
vehicles have been open to public use.
The trial was given the blessing of the Singapore government,
which has long sought to turn the city-state into a hub for
disruptive technology through generous financial-assistance
programs and research partnerships with firms like nuTonomy.
"Quite frankly I think Uber is the Goliath and we need to show
that our technology is working and getting to a level of maturity
that is viable for the marketplace," Doug Parker, chief operating
officer of nuTonomy, said in an interview Thursday. "We're in a
technology race here and I think there are going to be a handful of
winners."
NuTonomy's test vehicles, a Renault Zoe and Mitsubishi i-MiEV
electric car, will have a computer engineer and backup human driver
in case anything goes wrong, and can be hailed by select members of
the public using a smartphone app, the company said. The one-north
district is a self-contained area of about 0.8 square miles
accessible by trunk roads but much quieter than most public roads
in Singapore.
Mr. Parker said the Singapore government had laid out a series
of milestones for nuTonomy to achieve before it is allowed to
extend its trials to other areas of the city. He declined to
provide details on those milestones, but said the next stage would
be to expand the service to a neighborhood adjacent to
one-north.
"We are placing a strong bet that Singapore is going to be the
first country in the world to offer a consumer service" on a
national scale, Mr. Parker said, adding that nuTonomy is targeting
an island-wide autonomous taxi service as soon as 2018.
Yet while Singapore's small size and tightly controlled road
network make it a strong contender, nuTonomy is far behind the
likes of Uber, Google and Tesla Motors Inc. in funding and
publicity. Uber said earlier this month it will begin trials of its
own self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh by the end of August and
targets as many as 100 vehicles in the coming months.
The city of Pittsburgh is significantly larger than the
one-north district of Singapore and would allow Uber to collect
more data to advance its technology than its Singapore-based rival.
Uber already has a network of more than 1.5 million active drivers
world-wide offering ride-hailing taxi services.
Other firms, most notably Alphabet's Google, have already
clocked millions of miles on public roads with their autonomous
vehicles.
For many of these firms, regulation is their biggest challenge.
Autonomous vehicles are sold as safer and more reliable than human
drivers, but many people say they distrust machines because they
aren't capable of making moral or instinctive decisions as a human
may do. Some industry observers say autonomous driving technologies
are years away from public use for these reasons.
There have been some high-profile accidents involving autonomous
or semiautonomous vehicles, such as a fatal one earlier this year
in Florida involving Tesla's driver assistance software.
NuTonomy's Mr. Parker said one of the trial's goals is to
introduce the public to the new technology. "We don't want it to be
scary," he said.
Write to Jake Maxwell Watts at jake.watts@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 25, 2016 04:15 ET (08:15 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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