Moderation Team
Scottish ministers are to decide whether to permit self-driving taxis north of the Border after a firm announced autonomous cabs would carry their first passengers on UK roads “in the next couple of months”.
Wayve is teaming up with Uber to offer a similar service in London to that operated by companies such as Waymo in US cities such San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the UK innovators say their fleet of rpbotaxis will be able to pick up customers later this summer, says the Scotsman.
A driver will initially sit behind the wheel to be ready to take control during journeys while the technology is demonstrated to be safe.
However, self-driving vehicles have had a bumpy start in Scotland, with an autonomous bus trial over the Forth Road Bridge between Edinburgh and Fife, which boasted of being the world’s most advanced, scrapped last year because of poor passenger numbers.
The Department for Transport (DfT) last month invited applications for a trial of autonomous taxis, buses and coaches across Britain.
It said no submissions had been received for such bus or coach services in Scotland, while approval of self-driving taxis was a matter for the Scottish Government.
Neale Kinnear, founder of the Affective Mobility consultancy and a past head of transport safety at TRL, the UK Government’s former Transport Research Laboratory, said:
“The decision of when [self-driving taxis will start operating] will be a commercial one as much as a regulatory one.
“Having successfully trialled and launched in London will clearly make it easier to choose other UK cities for future rollout of the technology, likely in Glasgow or Edinburgh first in Scotland – but after Birmingham and Manchester?”
Annie Duvnjak, who leads global mobility autonomous operations at Uber, said it will launch with a “small fleet” of self-driving in London, before “scaling up over time”.
She said passengers soon “forget you’re in an autonomous vehicle, and that’s the beauty of it.”
(Picture: Olga Gonzalez)
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