Please consider Volvo to Test Full-Size Driverless Bus in Singapore.
Sweden’s Volvo Buses and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on Tuesday unveiled a full-size autonomous electric bus for testing this year in the city state. High-density Singapore has been encouraging the development of driverless technology in hopes that its residents will use more shared vehicles and public transport.
Tests with one bus on the university campus could begin in a few weeks to months, before moving to public roads after regulatory approvals, NTU President Subra Suresh told reporters. He hoped the tests could be extended to public roads in a year. A second bus will undergo tests at a city bus depot.
The 12-metre (39 ft) vehicle can carry up to 80 passengers and is the world’s first full-size, autonomous electric bus, Volvo and NTU said. “This is the type of vehicle that real operators would use and that’s why it is a milestone,” Håkan Agnevall, president of Volvo Buses, told reporters
Singapore ranked No. 2 globally in an index that assesses countries’ openness and preparedness for autonomous vehicles, according to a recent report by KPMG. The city-state is hoping to deploy autonomous buses on public roads in three different districts from 2022.
The skeptics tell me this won’t happen for decades, if then.
I suggest that if there is a snag, perhaps deployment will be delayed until 2023. That’s four years from now.
By now, it should be pretty damn clear where this is heading.
In the US, interstate truck driving will be driverless no later than the same timeframe
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
There is a big difference between one test in a very controlled environment and commercially viable service across a region.
Also note while we can take the first steps toward autonomous vehicles, Los Angeles has a problem with Hepatitis and Typhus, and San Francisco and Seattle can’t keep the crime, feces, or needles off its streets. What happens when they use the autonomous vehicles as public toilets?
It’s coming sooner than most think. The tipping point, where adoption will go exponential, will be when the large early testers like Waymo begin routinely publishing accident data.
The same thing happened with mandatory seat belts. Everyone had an opinion until the data showed that no seat belt was a huge killer compared to a seat belt.
I live in a suburb. So I don’t get the whole Autonomous Vehicle thing. It is much faster for me to drive to and from work in my car than it is to either wait for a bus or an Uber driver. Which is probably why those two modes of transportation are used in a minuscule way where I live.
Dropping the driver might reduce the costs, but my issue is time, not cost. And I’m not going to trade my personally-owned car for an AV because the AV is going to be more expensive and I’m going to have to give up my freedom to the car’s programmers. Lose-lose for me.
I would think the only people clamoring for this technology would be big city dwellers like Mish, where you find driving and traffic to be a horrible experience to begin with. There, I would think personal transportation costs would skyrocket simply because the costs of the vehicles would be so much more. But maybe that is worth it just to avoid driving in heavy traffic.
The question is will there be enough demand from the traffic-hating big city dwellers willing to pay extra to make it a viable long-term market? More than the technology, I think this will be the big question.
As for buses, they’re heavily subsidized by the government anyway. But I can see significant in-roads in the long-haul trucking industry. Assuming the technology actually gets there.
“…I’m not going to trade my personally-owned car for an AV because the AV is going to be more expensive and I’m going to have to give up my freedom to the car’s programmers.”
No point in owning an ‘AV’ yourself. You’ll call up one from a fleet using your smartphone. As you won’t have to pay the driver, nor a driveway/garage to store it, it will save you money. Eventually, it will also save you time as metro area AV fleets will be computerized on the road to minimize time.
And if you still resist, the safety record of AVs will only get better and governments will eventually restrict or heavily penalize private vehicle ownership.
Once they really get going, it will change as quickly as did the change from horse-and-buggys to cars.
For suburbanites, with a 2 hour commute, door-to-door autonomy while sleeping in a bed in the back of your minivan, is a nice perk.. For those less lazy, another 4 hours of work ain’t half bad either.
While that may all be a bit moot, since door to door autonomy is a long run (in the Keynesian sense) thing, but in places like California, lots and lots of people spend over an hour, each way, just on the freeway part of their commute. Even if they have to be woke up for the last mile to the office and house, that hour is a nice amount of time for autonomy to reclaim.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but should we not expect very fast adoption once the first buses prove they can handle roads. Obviously there are few snowstorms in Singapore, so this technology might not work in Wisconsin in winter, but it seems that a bus proven to work in Singapore (apart from the fact they drive on the left) should work in many other places. The same applies to trucks, etc. The software can be replicated quickly and incrementally improves simultaneously across the fleet. The mechanics of building the non-software parts of the bus seem to be a fairly straightforward engineering task. I imagine that the sensors will be replaceable and they will improve quickly as well.
Why would you expect very fast adoption for buses? They won’t save on the cost of the trip because that is already subsidized by the government. The government can save on the cost of the bus driver, but I’m not sure that it actually has a big desire to lay off all of its bus drivers, being the government and all.
I think the role of buses will change. Currently people like using the underground because trains come every few minutes – buses are far less frequent. Self driving buses could be made smaller, but more common and deliver underground-like frequency on our roads. If you know there will be a bus every few minutes the whole dynamic changes. This would be cost prohibitive with human drivers, but very feasible with self-driving vehicles.
Buses are not going to be “proven to handle roads” in the abstract. Some roads, in some conditions, some times, are easy. Others, less so.
My cars have been autonomous since I first started driving. They’ve been “proven to handle” the carefully (or sometimes less so…) chosen stretches of roads I have switched them into autonomous mode on, for at least long enough to allow me to open a bottle of coke and a bag of cheese puffs, from as far back as I can remember….
Watch Islamic insurgents (yes they are increasing in numbers in Malaysia as well…) engage this Volvo in a running gun battle through downtown Singapore, and call me back when it is “proven to handle the roads,” any condition without reservation, equally as well as an adaptive human driver with his own three kids sitting in the back of the bus….. In Latin America, drivers who ferry wealthy kids to school, carry guns. For a reason. You think this Volvo will do that? And know when to use them? Heck, screw Latin ; I bet drivers carting Barron around carry guns as well. A privilege reserved for the more equals and all…
Mish, you have a chip on your shoulder about this. I don’t recall anyone stating that testing wouldn’t occur for decades. I remember people stating widespread adoption would take a decade or more. And the jury’s still out on that.
The more correct Mish is, the faster average people will be kicked out of jobs. We need to discuss Universal Basic Income ASAP … funded in some way by all the savings these robot vehicles are going to produce (unless the plan is to route all savings to the billionaires as usual). Homeless, starving people are not compliant robots — we know how theyll react, and it wont be pretty.
So, people get free money and the price of everything goes up. How does that help anyone?
People get free money now (people get WAY WAY more money from Soc Sec/Medicare than they EVER paid in) and we have inflation now. Changes mean nothing changes. 🙂
We already have a system in place for that. It’s called welfare.
Which component of “welfare” do you qualify for today? If we are at an inflection point where finally the machines can do 51% of the work, what are we gonna do about all these unemployable, homeless, starving people??
I like the 4-year delay you just snuck in to your predictions. I expect to see a lot more of that kind of behavior. Your problem is that you didn’t find out what Scott Adams, creator of “Dilbert,” predicted on this topic.