British firm to test driverless taxis in Singapore next year

One of the automated taxis Delphi will be testing in Singapore. Photo credit: Delphi.

Self-driving cars will soon be competing for Singapore’s limited road space, if recent developments are any indication. UK-headquartered automotive tech firm Delphi announced yesterday it will deploy a test fleet of automated taxis in the city-state as early as next year.

From Reuters:

The project, run in partnership with the Singapore Land Transport Authority, will road test a concept that many companies investing in automated driving believe offers the fastest path to making such technology commercially viable.

Initially, the cars will have drivers ready to take over if the piloting systems fail, DeVos said. But by 2019 or 2020, “we’ll have removed drivers from the car,” Glen DeVos, Delphi’s vice president of engineering said in an interview.

Delphi hopes to launch a fully automated taxi service by 2022. According to the company, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) is particularly interested in what’s called the “first” and “last mile” service the cars can provide. That means ferrying passengers from their home or work to the nearest convenient public transport station and vice versa, rather than an Uber-like end-to-end service.

For now, it seems the tests will take place around the one-north area, a technology and academia hub where the Block 71 startup community is located. It’s the same location where other self-driving vehicle will be tested.

LTA announced in October 2015 that it would begin trials of automated vehicles for public transportation toward the end of this year. It said it had received eight national and international proposals in this regard. Delphi seems to be one of them.

Meanwhile, Singapore’s public transportation company, SMRT, acquired a 20 percent stake in Dutch autonomous vehicle maker 2Getthere just last month.

MIT spin-off company NuTonomy is also running its own self-driving car tests in Singapore. It raised US$16 million for its series A round, in order to launch driverless taxis in the country by 2018.