Switzerland is testing self-driving electric buses on public roads in the historical district of Sion, the largest city of the Canton of Valais. Passengers can use the buses free of charge.
Auto Revolution reports Switzerland Starts Testing Autonomous Bus On Public Roads.
Switzerland’s leading public bus operator has commenced testing self-driving buses on public roads.
These are driverless buses that are fully-electric and that can transport 11 passengers at a time. Their top speed is limited to 20 km/h (12.4 mph), but the project can improve the technology behind autonomous cars, as well as boosting acceptance of driverless vehicles.
Each shuttle will have a trained attendant on board, which will have to ensure that the vehicle is operating properly and that the passengers are safe. In the unlikely scenario that something goes wrong, the human attendant has two failsafe options, in the form of emergency stop controls.
The electric buses have an access ramp for physically challenged passengers, and air conditioning is installed. Moreover, they have been fitted with a second battery, so that travelers do not risk waiting on the side of the road if the primary accumulator runs out of “juice.”
Naturally, all of the buses will be monitored by a team of teleoperators, which will observe the actions of every vehicle in the fleet. Just like the personnel which will be on board these buses, the teleoperators have the ability to stop each and every bus from a distance, if they discover a fault which would put somebody at risk.
The new smart shuttle from PostBus also comes with a flexible timetable, which will include a few fixed stops. Passengers will be able to use an app to check whether the bus is available and if it is on the road when they want to ride it, as it only drives from Tuesday to Sunday.
Don’t Scoff
The top speed of 12.4 mph will probably bring some laughs. So will the need for public safety attendants and additional monitoring at the home base.
But don’t laugh too loudly. After all, this is 2016. By 2018, expect these buses to travel near the road speed limits.
Autonomous vehicles are now ahead of my schedule of 2020. Perhaps well ahead.
The big opportunity is trucks. Millions of long haul truck driving jobs will vanish by 2024 at the latest.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
mish i am 100% in agreement on self-driving cars and their impact. Most deflationary force since the internet. One angle i have not seen you comment on (perhaps you have!) that i think is the even biggger effect is over the next 10-20 years this is massively deflationary for real estate prices, especially big city low-interest rate fueled bubbles. Do you concur? I have much more detailed analysis, but curious if at first blush this is a consequence you have thought thru.
Mish — putting aside the advances in autonomous driving technology, have you considered the possibility that driver costs are not the constraining factor?
Trucks in the northeast corridor of the USA (Baltimore to Philli to NYC to Boston, just to use Amtrak’s label) have an average speed well below the advertised 55 mph. Its traffic, its bad roads, its perpetual construction, its “aggressive driving”.
Some truckers have tried to work around the problems by speeding at night. They get paid to deliver, not to sit in traffic jams — so there is always pressure to push the legal limits on speed and hours behind the wheel.
An autonomous truck can’t go through traffic jams any faster. Mario Andretti cannot drive a truck over pot holes and detours and around off-camber turns any faster. Its not a question of talent or technology — its the basic infrastructure that is the problem.
Freight trains can already bypass the driver problems, the hours problem… and they have mind boggling economies of scale for long haul trips that trucks simply cannot match. But they can’t avoid the bad infrastructure problem. There is a 104 year old rail bridge two towns over from me that stops CSX freight trains several times a week — and there is no budget to maintain the bridge, much less fix it.
I don’t see how putting a different driver (or a computer “driver”) is going to allow trucks or trains to bypass failing infrastructure
Mish,
Would I be wrong to associate the automation of certain jobs with an increase in the ability of countries to get by with lower levels of immigration? In spite of high levels of xenophobia, demographics tells us that various countries are going to be dependent on immigration to different degrees. The simplest, most elegant explanation of the sources of growth is that you can only grow your GDP if you have more people making stuff or each of them is making more stuff (higher productivity). Technology will reduce the need for workers and make the ones left more productive (at least technically, since more will be produced by fewer people). I’m not saying this is a good thing, but I’m wondering if fear of terrorism and xenophobia won’t help drive automation. Damn, talk about unintended consequences in complex issues.
Jeff Harbaugh, President
Jeff Harbaugh & Associates
Twitter: @Jeff_Harbaugh
I have a reply coming
Working on an article
Mish
“Autonomous vehicles are now ahead of my schedule of 2020. Perhaps well ahead.
The big opportunity is trucks. Millions of long haul truck driving jobs will vanish by 2024 at the latest.”
The economy will have a say.
If not already entering one, the global economy will be entering a recession soon enough.
Shelving for the time being (possibly a long time) capital expenditures for this endeavor (and many others).
Autonomous trucks have a lot of economics pushing them, but juries are not going to be sympathetic if something goes seriously wrong. So expect a big push by the Googles of the world to get legal protection, or at least caps on damages, before they can be deployed en masse. Driverless cars have no such economic benefits, and will be expensive…furthermore, in places like the West, where traffic moves smoothly on the expressways at 10-15 mph above the speed limit, they will be at a severe disadvantage, so I think they will be confined to lower speed, congested areas…
If you have autonomous vehicles driving the speed limit or below, even in small numbers, the affect of those rolling roadblocks on traffic will be devastating.
Here’s how it’s going to play out. 30,000 people per year die on American roads. If you take out suicide by gun, that’s 3 motor vehicle deaths for every gun death. That, my friends, is a public health hazard. Look for the CDC to weigh in. They’ll say, sure you can continue to drive your car but it’s going to cost you big time. Most people will not be able to afford to pay. Rolling roadblocks? LOL. They have much bigger things planned for you and yours…
Tony,
I think the the capital expenditure is already been spent. Once this thing starts its not going to stop.
Oh, you’re right. Not going to stop. I just think Mish is rather ambitious with his time frame.
Just last week he had a post on Cass Freight Index revealing lower than past 3 years.
See what happens to (core) capital goods orders during a recession [this is for US … but imagine similar charts elsewhere if recession global]
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NEWORDER
The same could be said for telecommuting and teleconferencing — the capital expense for both are there, the economics of telecommuting are enormous, having a “meeting” by teleconference with someone halfway around the world is instant and costs less than the taxi ride to the airport.
Google is a giant pile of money the trial lawyers are not going to leave alone. Tesla won’t last very long after January 20th (when their benefactor leaves office).
Trial lawyers own the democratic party, while Google owns Obama. That’s a civil war waiting to happen
It took a decade or more to roll out ATM machines and displace bank tellers. Same with Word processors/personal computers and secretaries. I guess self driving trucks, despite being far more experimental, will only take half that time.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-tesla-self-driving-cars-human-drivers-171042031.html
Mish,
I agree with your views on this topic, but you have not addressed one angle:
A sizable number of ‘drivers’ are courier delivery personnel. Even if the vehicle is driving itself, you will still need a human to take the package / envelope from the delivery vehicle to the recipient, and scan the delivery with the signature of the recipient.
Especially when delivering to a location with more than one floor, the human will still have his / her job.
The courier business will be replaced by drones, not self driving trucks.
Drone delivery works fine for homes or single-unit premises. How would a drone deliver on the (say) 29th floor to a business that is among (say) 50 businesses on that floor?
Today I was in a long-haul bus (I prefer not to drive myself since it is very tiresome) and the bus needed to stop due to the road construction/improvement where just one lane was open fro traffic. The situation was an example where a robot would need eyes to see what is happening in oncoming traffic. Interesting to see how they solve unexpected situations. Also something going 20 km/h would take ages to reach destination.
Another side is that in my country there are winter conditions that even the most experienced drivers face severe difficulties. The road can simultaneously be in ice and rainwater on top of ice which makes any kind of wheels loose grip on the surface. In those situations turning the wheel in a certain way against the logic is needed to keep the vehicle on the road.
I admit that these are rare events but do occur almost every winter not to mention snow which can in a very short time pour a 4 inch layer on the road.
I would not go in to any automated vehicle under those conditions. But who lives, sees.
With enough disk space, everything can be modeled. It won’t be perfect out of the gate but in very short order it will be several magnitudes better than human judgement…
“With enough disk space, everything can be modeled.”
I disagree. The day we actually have Artificial Intelligence robots – that could baby-sit your children – we could start discussion about 100% self-driving vehicles (not only lane-keeping and such).
Of course then there is loading and unloading and so on, with all different kind of trucks, ranging from containers, to cranes for timber, materials, bulk, liquid tanks…
As pointed out above, the cost of operating/owning/insuring a heavy truck is many times more expensive than salary to the driver. I could write a book about this, but why should I.
Cheers.
The next big thing will be riderless cars, and buses.
So the robots will just enjoy driving themselves around?
Hi Mish,
Bus is slow transportation to begin with. The average speed is pretty close to the 12.4 mph listed here. Yes, I understand that with stops these buses will be even slower, but don’t be confused, bus transit, whether operated by human, or robot, is slow.
http://cityobservatory.org/urban-buses-are-slowing-down/
As you note, these are simply tests, and the operating speeds are likely to increase. It would be better if these buses would deviate from the concept of fixed stops and move to a much more rider friendly system where the rider would simply enter pick up and drop off locations into a smart phone and then allow a ride sharing application to schedule the most efficient route for the bus.
This is likely to “out of the box” for most bureaucrats, so let the private sector take over this function.
The Gold Standard in transit will always be fast, efficient, comfortable door-to-door transportation. A few minor alterations and this will be much closer than the antiquated transit we have today.
Mark Sherman
Visit me at my blog sometime, maddogslair.com
Traffic speed in London is 20mph on main roads, 9 mph in central London. Private cars choke a town of this density to death (literally).
I think railway is a more economical solution for long haul goods transport. (And passengers too). It can carry the equivalent of dozens of trucks. Then you use trucks for local distribution.
I want a robot to fix things around my house for me. Get to work engineers.
Good idea, why haven´t anybody invented a robot to scrape and paint houses yet?
Here are links to a deadly Tesla car crash. The company sort of advertises that the system is an “autopilot” when it actually is an advanced cruise control.
Legal proceedings are sure to follow.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/30/12072634/tesla-autopilot-crash-autonomous-mode-viral-video
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-investigation-idUSKCN0ZG2ZC