In December 2015, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his company would be ready to bring to the market its self-driving car. On Tuesday, Delphi Automotive went one step ahead and announced it would offer a small fleet of driverless taxis which would ferry passengers around a business park in Singapore.
Although the cab would still have a driver, it would still translate into savings for the passenger since fare is expected to go down by an average of $3 a mile to 90 cents, said Delphi Automotive. The drivers would be ready to take over the taxi operation if the system fails, but the transport firm plans to gradually phase out the drivers by 2019, reported BBC.
In 2019, the taxis would be fully autonomous and would come without a steering wheel, although it would be tested only with a controlled group of people. For now the company’s six Audi taxis’ travel would be limited to a 3.5-mile route in One North, a business district in Singapore.
Riders would be able to book the services of the Delphi Automotive self-driving taxis through a software that would be fitted in the cab similar to what ride-sharing services Lyft and Uber offer. In 2015, the vehicle electronics supplier held coast-to-coast demonstration of autonomous vehicles in the U.S. The transport firm has an autonomous fleet in Silicon Valley.
Besides Delphi, another company, NuTonomy, also started testing a self-driving taxi in Singapore, according to The Verge.
Glen DeVos, vice president of engineering for Delphi, sees the transport company’s autonomous taxis offering other services than ferrying people such as picking up dry cleaning or carry-out before picking passengers from their offices.