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Page added on August 25, 2016
World’s first self-driving taxis debut in Singapore
The world’s first self-driving taxis are picking up passengers in Singapore.
Select members of the public began hailing free rides Thursday through their smartphones in taxis operated by nuTonomy, an autonomous vehicle software startup. While multiple companies, including Google and Volvo, have been testing self-driving cars on public roads for several years, nuTonomy says it is the first to offer rides to the public. It beat ride-hailing service Uber, which plans to offer rides in autonomous cars in Pittsburgh, by a few weeks.
The service is starting small — six cars now, growing to a dozen by the end of the year. The ultimate goal, say nuTonomy officials, is to have a fully self-driving taxi fleet in Singapore by 2018, which will help sharply cut the number of cars on Singapore’s congested roads. Eventually, the model could be adopted in cities around the world, nuTonomy says.
For now, the taxis are only running in a 2.5-square-mile business and residential district called “one-north,” and pick-ups and drop-offs are limited to specified locations. And riders must have an invitation from nuTonomy to use the service. The company says dozens have signed up for the launch, and it plans to expand that list to thousands of people within a few months.
The cars — modified Renault Zoe and Mitsubishi i-MiEV electrics — have a driver in front who is prepared to take back the wheel and a researcher in back who watches the car’s computers. Each car is fitted with six sets of Lidar — a detection system that uses lasers to operate like radar — including one that constantly spins on the roof. There are also two cameras on the dashboard to scan for obstacles and detect changes in traffic lights.
The testing time-frame is open-ended, said nuTonomy CEO Karl Iagnemma. Eventually, riders may start paying for the service, and more pick-up and drop-off points will be added. NuTonomy also is working on testing similar taxi services in other Asian cities as well as in the U.S. and Europe, but he wouldn’t say when.
“I don’t expect there to be a time where we say, ‘We’ve learned enough,'” Iagnemma said.
Doug Parker, nuTonomy’s chief operating officer, 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. You can create smaller roads, you can create much smaller car parks,” Parker said. “I think it will change how people interact with the city going forward.”
NuTonomy, a 50-person company with offices in Massachusetts and Singapore, was formed in 2013 by Iagnemma and Emilio Frazzoli, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers who were studying robotics and developing autonomous vehicles for the Defense Department. Earlier this year, the company was the first to win approval from Singapore’s government to test self-driving cars in one-north. NuTonomy announced a research partnership with Singapore’s Land Transport Authority earlier this month.
Singapore is ideal because it has good weather, great infrastructure and drivers who tend to obey traffic rules, Iagnemma says. As a land-locked island, Singapore is looking for non-traditional ways to grow its economy, so it’s been supportive of autonomous vehicle research.
Auto supplier Delphi Corp., which is also working on autonomous vehicle software, was recently selected to test autonomous vehicles on the island and plans to start next year.
“We face constraints in land and manpower. We want to take advantage of self-driving technology to overcome such constraints, and in particular to introduce new mobility concepts which could bring about transformational improvements to public transport in Singapore,” said Pang Kin Keong, Singapore’s Permanent Secretary for Transport and the chairman of its committee on autonomous driving.
Olivia Seow, 25, who does work in startup partnerships in one-north and is one of the riders nuTonomy selected, took a test ride of just less than a mile on Monday. She acknowledged she was nervous when she got into the car, and then surprised as she watched the steering wheel turn by itself.
“It felt like there was a ghost or something,” she said.
But she quickly grew more comfortable. The ride was smooth and controlled, she said, and she was relieved to see that the car recognized even small obstacles like birds and motorcycles parked in the distance.
“I couldn’t see them with my human eye, but the car could, so I knew that I could trust the car,” she said. She said she is excited because the technology could free up her time during commutes or help her father by driving him around as he grows older.
An Associated Press reporter taking a ride Wednesday observed that the safety driver had to step on the brakes once, when a car was obstructing the test car’s lane and another vehicle, which appeared to be parked, suddenly began moving in the oncoming lane.
Iagnemma said the company is confident that its software can make good decisions. The company hopes its leadership in autonomous driving will eventually lead to partnerships with automakers, tech companies, logistics companies and others.
“What we’re finding is the number of interested parties is really overwhelming,” he said.
29 Comments on "World’s first self-driving taxis debut in Singapore"
onlooker on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 3:15 pm
File this story where you would file one related to cruises to the Arctic and North Pole. Category = Stories of the absurdity of modern Civilization
Cloggie on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 4:11 pm
It is not absurd. People soon will no longer need a privately owned car, that will rot away along the road side 98% of the time; now that is absurd. It is macrobus without an expensive driver. It is cheaper than a taxi. And you can use your travel time for reading, watching youtube, make phone calls or knit a pullover.
Anonymous on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 4:36 pm
More tech-NO-fix nonsense.
” The ultimate goal, say nuTonomy officials, is to have a fully self-driving taxi fleet in Singapore by 2018, which will help sharply cut the number of cars on Singapore’s congested roads. Eventually, the model could be adopted in cities around the world, nuTonomy says.”
No, the ultimate goal, is try and find an excuse to get rid of taxis, and have some rent-seeking ‘innovator'(corporation) pocket the (former) taxi-drivers incomes. What will the former taxi drivers do? Who cares, they can become call-center techs, or apps designers.
As for the dubious notion fleets of robo-cards will cut the number of cars in Singapore or anywhere else? LoL, no. Every seen a pic of NY or other major car-dependant cities? The roads are choked with yellow NON-autonomous cabs. Cabs driven by humans have done absolutely nothing to alleviate congestion. If anything, we simply swap private car congestion, for a mix of yellow cab\private car congestion. There is ZERO evidence, that robo-cars will do anything to reduce car congestion. None whatsoever. Anyone telling you robocars can or will do this, is simply lying.
None of this even touches on the small problem that robo-cars simply don’t work-at least as their proponents advertise. But that’s another topic in of itself.
steam_cannon on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 4:45 pm
Regarding reducing congestion. In most cities two lanes of the city roads are used for parking. If just one of those lanes could be freed up, it would open up a lot of space for transportation. Taxi’s are too expensive to have this kind of effect. But with with enough robotic cars and some changes to the laws, it is certainly possible.
Sometimes big changes happen. Most people used to know how to ride a horse or hitch up a carriage. Today most people know how to drive. If tech replaces driving, that’s a big change and wouldn’t that be something to see.
Cloggie on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 4:46 pm
You can reduce the number of cabs on the road by using IT algorithms and combine trajectories and have 3-5 people in a car rather than a single passenger and a driver. If you can sit in a bus with strangers, you can sit with a few people in a car, provided the identity is known to the car pool server. You can match people by gender, age, human interest, etc.
ghung on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 5:07 pm
… an extraordinary level of bargaining here.
How about building and encouraging walkable/bikeable neighborhoods, and keeping people closer to home. They better get used to that. Meanwhile, just tax the crap out of inner-city ICE transportation, use the funds to build out electrified people movers, and close most streets to everything else. Want to drive your car into the city? You’ll have to pay $50 to use one of the few roads still open to that. Allowing so many cars (driverless or otherwise) into clusterfuck cities like New York or Singapore is astoundingly absurd.
Outcast_Searcher on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 6:13 pm
It’s encouraging to see the signs of incrementalism with self-driving cars.
Perhaps they’ll become viable for limited circumstances (say some city driving and interstate driving) far sooner than the decades it will likely take for truly all-modes fully autonomous cars.
The dark side, to me, is when such vehicles actually start taking lots of jobs instead of providing them. (Both in Singapore and in Pittsburgh, and with Google cars, each self driving car has a human at the ready to take over, so until deemed ready, they’re providing lots of jobs between development and monitoring).
Outcast_Searcher on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 6:17 pm
Ghung, let’s pretend that a competent fleet of self driving cars in major cities won’t actually eliminate the need for a LOT of cars being built. And parked. And serviced. And causing crowding. And causing life cycle GHG production.
Because to admit such a thing would be to admit everything isn’t total doom — I get it.
If driverless cars work well and become fully autonomous, it will be an incredible boon to everyone but those who love to drive their own car. Car transport will be cheaper, safer, cleaner, and more convenient overall, by far.
Those people will just have to live with renting time on a track. Somehow, they’ll just have to try to survive.
Anonymous on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 6:44 pm
Anything to keep car-dependency a viable business model. One year, its hydrogen hoaxsters, next, its 100k+ EVs, right atm, the current is rage is robocars. What will it be tomorrow? Teleporting cars? (Can’t just teleport you know, people, because that would cut cars out of the loop-can’t have that).
One thing the cars-first crowd here wont admit, is 2 ton, oil powered people movers are a losing proposition. You can try to tack on some ‘smart algorithms’, and even let google take over traffic management, if that what it takes to make you feel the future (of cars only transportation), has finally arrived. Cept it has hasn’t arrived, and won’t. You can’t robocar your way out of pollution and congestion, and the 100s of other problems cars-only transportation creates.
ghung on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 7:07 pm
Alright, OS, enjoy your Johnny Cab.
Hello on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 7:26 pm
It is mindboogling that this technology works reliably enough to be let loose in an actual city.
I’m mighty impressed. I would have bet my house that this wont’ happen anytime soon.
But the again, I also thought PO was in 2008, so I guess I’m easily fooled.
peakyeast on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 7:46 pm
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital-technology.html
” A handful of microchips can have as much embodied energy as a car.”
So this car is probably actually 3 cars – resourcewise..
antaris on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 8:07 pm
One day we have driverless horses, if they don’t get eaten first !
rockman on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 8:29 pm
ghung – Not sure about other cities but in Houston you’ll never see our Yellow cabs replaced by driverless cabs. And for good reason: YC is not in the taxi business…they are in the taxi cab rental business. Learned this when I drove one during the 80’s bust. The fare goes 100% to the driver…YC doesn’t pay 1¢ to its drivers. You pay YC for the use of the cab and the radio dispatch. Just the opposite of NYC: 99% of Houston cabs are dispatched and not flagged.
So the driver pays Yellow Cab $X per 24 hrs. If the driver collects $Y in fares he nets the difference. IOW sometimes you drive 16 hours and make money. But if $Y is less than $X you lose money that day.
The YC revenue is strictly a function of how many cabs they put on the street: more cabs…more revenue. For the drivers: more cabs…mores competition…less money for the driver.
Why would YC give up such a sweet deal? LOL.
Davy on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 8:40 pm
It will never amount to much. It will be too prone to failures especially as society begins to visibly fail. Ghung made the most realistic point. We are again putting lots of resources and human capital to work on something that has no future. This is more of the same attitudes and lifestyles that got us to the cliff. Technology like this reminds me of the fool card in the Tarot set. We are cavalierly walking next to a precipice blind to reality and delusional to our own well being. We are going to have to worry about highways turning into overgrown fields not this kind of exaggerated exercise in self-gratification.
JuanP on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 10:51 pm
Removing humans from behind the wheel might not be such a bad idea! How much worse could computers be? LOL!
This obviously doesn’t solve environmental degradation, global warming, desertification, deforestation, aquifers depletion, soil erosion, ocean acidification, climate change, overpopulation, resource depletion, or any of the other problems we have.
peakyeast on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 2:27 am
With self-driving cars… It will be easy to make a “hold-up” and rob the people in the car.
It is going to stop just nicely right in front of the robber(s) in any place of their choosing.
To mitigate this will they put in a “stop for nothing mode”? Exciting!
Cloggie on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 5:54 am
Anonymous said: “One thing the cars-first crowd here wont admit, is 2 ton, oil powered people movers are a losing proposition. ”
Yeah, perhaps. But meanwhile we are stuck with a global car reality. Robocar could be an intermediate step between the present reality and a carfree (carefree?) future. The most important psychological step would that people would be relieved from the necessity of car ownership, that would be a huge step.
Cloggie on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 6:01 am
“With self-driving cars… It will be easy to make a “hold-up” and rob the people in the car.
It is going to stop just nicely right in front of the robber(s) in any place of their choosing.”
The difference between bus- and trainpassengers and robocar passengers is, that the first are anonymous, but the second have to be known by the robocar server (registration with passports, fingerprints, iris-scan, dna and what not), including criminal record.
Furthermore you can ensure that you only group passengers of the same gender, age or… very edgy… the same ethncity, as people from the same ethnic-religeous group are far less likely to rob each other. And like in trains you have first and second class, if you are rich or are a beautiful woman, you can travel ‘”first class”, meaning alone.
Cloggie on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 6:16 am
@peakyeast – after the Richard Heinberg debacle I have become ever more allergic against all these super doomers and Nostradamus wannebees like “our own” apneaman’s and thir “data”. The idea that “a handful of microchips have more embedded energy than a car” is grotesque, like your leftists of “lowtechmagazine” claim.
You can produce a laptop with the energy content of a few 10 liter buckets of oil:
http://greenelectronicscouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/slateswkshp/GECTabletsWorkshopDec2013_LCA_Teehan.pdf
According to Volkswagen the production of a Golf requires 18,000 kwh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy
A liter of oil is roughly 10 kwh, so a laptop requires something like 500 kwh to produce.
Conclusion: cancel your lowtechmagazine subscription.
joe on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 8:54 am
Who cares about the damn tech. The rule of who wins will be a problem for insurance companies, who pays least, wins. Can we move on from this distraction.
http://fortune.com/2016/08/26/oil-prices-fall-as-saudi-arabia-dampens-prospects-of-output-freeze/
The fun and games begin. The opec meeting in Algeria will be watched by many. Tight oil drillers will hope Saudi freezes (note, not a cut), I guess Iran and Iraq might be a foil to Saudi largess. OPEC could be another zombie of globalisation.
Boat on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 10:14 am
clog,
So I need food and the grocery store is 6 miles away. Will the car wait or do I call another. I go to load my groceries and there are other passengers. How happy will they be to wait. We all get to to the house and it starts to lighting. Am I forced to risk my life during my multiple trips to the house or will the other passengers just be pissed while I wait for a storm to pass. I think I’ll keep my car.
Cloggie on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 10:24 am
“So I need food and the grocery store is 6 miles away. Will the car wait or do I call another.”
One of those.
ghung on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 10:43 am
“I think I’ll keep my car…. come hell or high water.
Anonymous on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 11:15 am
Sorry cloggie, but you that study you linked is well…worthless. It only looks at LCA of wait for it..CO2. One single element, or narrow sliver in the lifecycle of some consumer electronics. Measureing the carbon emissions released during the production of a (device), is NOT a measure of how much embodied energy, or materials the object requires for its manufacture. I thought you were smarter than this. That study is of limited utility since it tells us nothing about the amount of energy used to actually produce those artifacts. It only measures how much co2 was released by durings it manufacture, a completely different, and not terribly useful proposition. Likewise, I am sure VWs claims about the embodied energy of their cars is also equally suspect, because, you know, PR dept, spin, greenwashing etc. I am willing to bet VW only looked at the direct manufactured energy for one of its trash cans, and not the entire supply\production chain from raw materials extraction to finished product. IoW, spin.
The idea you are going to produce a complex data device, with its global supply chains, for 500 kwh, is a fantasy.
Cloggie on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 11:39 am
Anonymous, I write posts from my general experience, I do not carry out scientific studies dedicated the the particular post.
you are of course right that embodied energy is more than the energy used during the construction f the end product, it also should include transport, mining etc.
If I open my link I see that the report was carried out by the University of British Colombia. In 2016 I still am inclined to assume that the UBC has not yet been destroyed by affirmative action to the tune that the author of the article doesn’t understand what embodied energy means. I am not going to read the entire article to verify your claim.
I gladly accept your proposition that VW lies to high heaven, because it would only add support to my claim that it takes order of magnitude more energy to produce a VW than a “handful of microchips”.
peakyeast on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 6:20 pm
Cloggie: Comparing a laptop to the system needed for an autonomous car is just as vague as a “handful of microchips”.
Besides your study says about itself that it is “HIGHLY UNRELIABLE”.
The data come from companies that may have an interest in looking Good and Green.
The study is funded by Dell who might have the same interest.
So all in all.. one viewpoint – and another.
Cheers as our lovely local plant says.
peakyeast on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 6:20 pm
Oh yeah – and the ecoinvent 2 methodology – uh – that is one nasty nest of loopholes.
You can get any result you want with enough effort.
Davy on Fri, 26th Aug 2016 7:15 pm
Peak, if clog is using VW data he is being pretty accommodating of what may be the truth. VW is a corporate culture built upon lies. The emission scandal is I am sure the tip of the iceberg.