The world’s first fully autonomous taxi service launched in Singapore yesterday, as the world moves rapidly towards fully autonomous driving.
A small autonomous taxi service in Singapore might seem like small news, but it’s the first proper fully autonomous taxi service there has ever been, and the date it launched – Thursday 25 August 2016 – will mark the start of a technology revolution that will change the world.
True, the taxi service – a small number of Mitsubishi i-MiEv electric cars – is very small scale, still has an engineer behind the wheel to take over if needed (and, no doubt, to make the service legal) and is free to use.
It’s also in a country the size of a small city, Singapore, and then in a small business district of that city, a city state with very ordered traffic and roads and one where private cars are limited in number due to enormous taxation.
But small and contained though the service may be, the company which has developed the autonomous technology – nuTonomy, founded just a couple of years ago by a couple of MiT researchers – has beaten every big player – from Google to Uber – to the prize.
But what it does demonstrate is that autonomous driving technology is progressing so quickly it could be entirely viable in just a few years, which will impact car owners, but will impact the economy and employment far, far more.
It’s going to be a huge challenge for governments to cope with the loss of millions and millions of driving jobs across the globe as every taxi, bus and commercial vehicle disposes of the human behind the wheel.
And you thought Brexit would be a challenge for the economy.
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