Last year the Seoul city government passed an ordinance enabling the commercial operation of autonomous passenger-carrying vehicles. A six square kilometer region in the Seoul neighborhood of Sangam, near the 2002 World Cup Stadium, was designated as a pilot program test bed. This area encompasses 24 streets totaling 31.3 km. Two companies were selected, and the pilot program launched a few weeks ago. Currently there are three vehicles and passengers can ride for free during this introductory phase. Three more taxis and a bus will be added within this year, with plans for 50 in this region by 2026. For the time being, these cars require a standby driver who takes control in an emergency and in school zones. Check out the short news report (in English) below the break.
There was a smaller autonomous driving test program in the city of Sejong which we wrote about back in January, and [Alfred Jones] gave a keynote presentation at the 2020 Hackaday Remoticon on the challenges of designing self-driving vehicles if you want to learn more on this topic.
please correct ‘a keynote presentation at the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon ‘ as this was at the 2020 Remoticon
Thanks, Erik. I fixed that.
Well there goes my Uber gig.
No, once they get rid of the backup drivers, take their seat and start charging fares!
Still somebody behind the wheel though? Self driving but not driverless. When they go fully driverless, who will get the blame when somebody gets run over? Cars getting recalled due to stupid software errors all the time, and yet they want to go ahead and put software in charge of the entire vehicle?
Well, as we all know computers never have any errors, software glitches, bad programming, or crashes. 🤔
Fully automated vehicles have no place on public roadways. I hope no one else has to die to prove this.
To be fair, more than half the drivers have no place on public roads, but… economy, liberties, rights of stupidity etc.
Uh my friend driverless cars will happen. It’s only a matter of time. Computers will drive better than humans.
And then, because of safety, humans won’t be allowed to drive at all.
Self driving doesn’t have to be perfect. Perfect is really hard. It just has to be better than humans. Better than humans is really easy.
So easy that despite pumping billions into research globally, it’s still not done outside of small-scale trials? Or easier than that?
It’s a super hard problem. Doesn’t mean it’s not solvable, though.
He meant better than him
It is a very difficult problem which is why many car companies are betting on V2X sensors and infrastructure to effectively give autonomous vehicles permanent training wheels instead of making them truly autonomous.
I had a dream once where a local hardware store had a fully automated shuttle between the two locations they owned…it looked like a big golf cart and had a diesel engine…and it could go sixty miles an hour.
@Chris Lott said: “Seoul Introduces Self-Driving Taxis”
Seoul must use Kia Soul cars [1] for all their self-driving taxis ;-)
1. Kia Soul
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kia_Soul