If you’re looking to take a ride in a self-driving taxi, Singapore might be your best bet for an autonomous ride. Later this year, Delphi Automotive will launch a small test fleet of self-driving taxis that will drive passengers around a district of Singapore.
Delphi will be using six self-driving Audi SQ5s that will drive passengers along three fixed routes that cover about 5 miles. Delphi said there will be a human in the car ready to take over the car in case of an emergency. However, the plan is to remove that human and eventually the steering wheel, hopefully by 2019 or 2020.
This project, which is being run in partnership with the Singapore Land Transport Authority, is one of the first real-world tests of self-driving rides on demand.
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“It allows us to demonstrate that we have the complete ecosystem, knowledge and capability, the vehicle, the sensors, the automated software controlling connectivity to the cloud, the management of the fleet, the data and analytics on how the vehicle is performing,” says Glen DeVos, VP of engineering for Delphi.
Delphi plans to launch by 2022 a regularly-operating self-driving taxi service in Singapore. Delphi said a location in the United States could be chosen later in 2016 to test a similar service.
Delphi made national headlines in 2015 when its self-driving SQ5 completed a 3,500-mile trip from San Francisco, California to New York, setting the North American record for longest drive ever by a driverless car. The self-driving SQ5 featured ssix long-range radars, four short-range radars, three vision-based cameras, six lidars, a localization system, intelligent software algorithms and a full suite of Advanced Drive Assistance Systems.
