Commentary
Daimler, Bosch To Test Autonomous Taxi Service
- by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, November 16, 2018
Autonomous vehicle testing around the country is picking up steam, at least from the perspective of the companies planning the testing.
Now Daimler and Bosch are getting set to test a highly and fully automated driving on-demand ride-hailing service in San Jose.
The service, using automated Mercedes-Benz S-Class vehicles, will be offered to a selected user community in the San Carlos/Stevens Creek corridor between downtown and west San Jose, according to a blog post by Daimler.
“The pilot project is an opportunity to explore how autonomous vehicles can help us better meet future transportation needs,” stated San Jose mayor Sam Liccardo.
The on-demand ride-sharing service will be operated by Daimler Mobility Service and will be testing how car sharing services likecar2Go, ride-hailing by Mytaxi and multi-modal platforms like Moovel can be intelligently connected.
As in most tests, the self-driving cars will be monitored by a safety driver and will operated from a designated pick-up location and drive automatically to the determined destination.
The two major brands of Daimler and Bosch are working together, with Daimler providing the development vehicles, test facilities and vehicles for the test fleet and Bosch providing components specified during the development work, such as sensors, actuators and control units. The partners use their laboratories and test rigs from their respective test sites in Germany.
The self-driving car trials won’t start until next year.
This is only one of many self-driving tests in the works. For example, Ford is partnering with Walmart to test how autonomous vehicles could be used for grocery deliveries, Alphabet’s Waymo is going to test self-driving cars without a test driver in California and Toyota and Softbank are working together combining the artificial intelligence work with autonomous vehicle technology.
After some of these major brands get their autonomous technology up to speed, the end customers – the people who might actually ride in those vehicles – will have their say.
Chuck Martin is Editor of the AI & IoT Daily at MediaPost and writes the daily Connected Thinking column. He is a NY Times Business bestselling author and his latest book is “Digital Transformation 3.0” (The New Business-to-Consumer Connections of The Internet of Things.) He is CEO of Net Future Institute and a frequent keynote speaker internationally. Follow him on Twitter @chuckmartin and contact him at Chuck@MediaPost.com.
“The pilot project is an opportunity to explore how autonomous vehicles can help us better meet future transportation needs,” stated San Jose mayor Sam Liccardo."
Tell me Mr. Mayor, how does this meet "future transportation needs"? There is still a vehicle on the road. All you have done is elimanated a job as a driver. But we have a vehicle chaperone anyway who is getting paid. Speaking of pay, I've been waiting since 2015 to hear a price tag on what are the additional costs to produce a self driving car. But being in SJ, where the average home is $900,000. the techies there won't care about price.
We continue to look for an estimate of that number, Mark.
Wonder if it will be like drug companies, develop a drug for a half billion, then that price is divided by an estimated production number. My bet is it adds $17-22,000 per car to say "Im hands Free". and obsolete in weeks. They will spend most of the time downloading fixes and/or hacks.