Toyota Motor is set to launch a pilot project testing a transportation system focusing on autonomous vehicles, in one of Japan's first such initiatives in a real-life setting over a wide area. The company will team up with the University of Tsukuba and the government of the city, just north of Tokyo, to run the project. Under the system envisioned, self-driving, single-seat electric vehicles will take passengers from their homes to the nearest bus stop, where they will be able to transfer to autonomous, fuel-cell powered buses. The experiment, set for launch in fiscal 2019 and running until fiscal 2022, will test the feasibility of the relevant technologies in situations involving regular traffic. One of the main aims of the project is to help resolve the issue of elderly citizens being isolated from their communities.
Google was one of the pioneers of self-driving cars and is featured in the book. Google's autonomous driving operations are now concentrated in the Waymo division of Alphabet. Self-driving cars are likely to change the world dramatically in ways that few people expect, and you will miss them if you only focus on the autonomous driving part. This should not be surprising. When automobile engines started to replace horses, nobody really foresaw the consequences either.
Hanyang University's ACE Lab successfully trialed its autonomous car, dubbed the A1, that ran on LG Uplus's 5G network on the streets of Seoul. LG Uplus and Hanyang University have successfully trialled their 5G-connected autonomous vehicle, which rode on the streets of Seoul alongside regular cars, the pair have announced. The 5G autonomous vehicle, dubbed the A1, rode through roads with heavy traffic in Seoul. The A1 drove eight kilometres in the span of 25 minutes. The car was shown to have changed lanes and reacted to cars cutting through traffic.