Forget about robo-taxis in San Francisco: Autonomous vehicles are real in Singapore

Despite the dollars and hype, self-driving vehicles have been a bust so far in San Francisco and mostly nonexistent in Boston.

But thousands of miles away in Singapore, the technology is thriving — not on roads and highways but rather the city-state’s port, the second-largest in the world and a key hub in the global supply chain.

The vehicles in question are not robo-taxis, but rather trucks that transport large shipping containers across the sprawling facility.

PSA International, which operates the port, currently has more than two dozen trucks operating without any human drivers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The trucks are equipped with software developed by startup Venti Technologies in Boston.

The automated trucks represent only a small fraction of PSA’s fleet of 1,000 vehicles. But that the vehicles can independently and reliably perform their duties on a continuous basis without human assistance represents a big moment for self-driving technology, said Heidi Wyle, CEO and founder of Venti.

“It is a major milestone towards the promise of autonomy actually becoming real,” Wyle said.

The same can’t be said for robo-taxis. Companies backed by Google and General Motors have burned through billions of dollars in cash with little hope of profits in the near future. Last fall, California regulators suspended Cruise’s self driving license because of several accidents, including an incident when a human-driven vehicle hit a pedestrian and threw her into the path of a Cruise car.

So why have autonomous vehicles at Singapore’s port seem to be progressing faster than robo-taxis? For one thing, operating self-driving cars in dense urban cores was always going to be difficult given the number of variables — weather, street designs, traffic patterns, pedestrians — that a robo-taxi must consider.

But transportation hubs such as ports, warehouses, and airports are mostly enclosed spaces where companies like Venti can more easily work out the technology’s kinks.

“The complexity of an enclosed yard like we work in is probably at least 10,000 times simpler in terms of the computational problem than a downtown urban environment,” Wyle said.

Plus, logistics arguably offers a more viable initial market for autonomous vehicles, especially when people consider the shortage of truck drivers in major countries like the United States and Japan and how badly the global supply chain crumbled during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We need to be smarter,” Kim Pong Ong, CEO of PSA International, told the Globe. “The labor pool has gotten tighter and more expensive over the years. It has gotten harder and harder to get manual drivers.”

That’s why Safar Partners, a venture capital firm in Cambridge, decided to back Venti instead of a robo-taxi startup.

“Venti was a wonderful first step to get involved in autonomous driving,” said Arunas Chesonis, managing partner of Safar.

Even though logistics might be less challenging than robo-taxis, Chesonis said Venti’s work with such a large port in Singapore was a complex endeavor.

“They didn’t take the easiest first customer” with PSA, he said. “They took the tiger by the tail in a large, demanding organization. And to actually [succeed] is even more impressive.”

Source: www.bostonglobe.com