If you're looking to get a taste of the future of transport, then you should head over to Berlin, where a driverless bus has just begun ferrying real-life passengers along a 1,2-kilometre circuit for the first time. The maiden voyage took place at a quarter past ten last Friday morning, as the first computer-controlled bus set off from U-Bahn Alt-Tegel. According to Berlin's transport authority, the BVG, it is the first vehicle of its kind to drive on public roads in Germany's capital city. When you picture an automated vehicle, you might think in sleek lines, futuristic chrome and glass, but the BVG's sunshine-yellow driverless bus is - there's no other word for it - undeniably cute. Rather oddly-proportioned, it is capable of speeds of up to 15 kilometres per hour and can carry a total of six passengers at a time, as well as an attendant - just in case.

Yesterday afternoon, I rode an autonomous shuttle down a short section of Broadway in the heart of Times Square, and it was easily the most boring part of my day. I'm not saying that because my life is particularly exciting, either. The trip was boring because everything inside the Coast Autonomous P-1 worked exactly the way it was supposed to: The shuttle crawled up to a barricade on 47th Street, paused for a bit, and scooted back in the opposite direction toward 48th. In this case, the vehicle wasn't completely autonomous -- Coast CTO Pierre Lefevre manually started each leg of a trip with an Xbox Elite controller -- but the P-1 navigated its surroundings all own its own. That short trip was one of many small-scale tests the company has put on over the years, all of which speak to the commercial viability of tiny, driverless buses.

FUKUSHIMA – Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. is set to pick a driverless electric bus made by a SoftBank Group Corp. unit to transport those decommissioning its disaster-crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, informed sources said. The bus service will start this spring, transporting workers within the plant, which was disabled by a triple core meltdown after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Last November, Tepco conducted a test of the bus made by SB Drive Corp., the SoftBank unit, and another from DeNA Co. As a result, Tepco decided to adopt SB Drive's bus, giving it high marks for safety and ease of maintenance, the sources said. The bus, called the Arma, is 4.75 meters long and can hold 15 passengers.

City officials in Bismarck are considering adding a driverless bus to the Capital Area Transit fleet as part of a pilot program testing the use of autonomous vehicle technology on city streets.

The electric vehicle developed by the French company Navya collided with the semi-truck less than two hours after people began to take rides. The bus has an attendant and computer monitor but no steering wheel or brake pedals.

Residents of Helsinki, Finland will soon be used to the sight of buses with no drivers roaming the city streets. One of the world's first autonomous bus pilot programs has begun in the Hernesaari district, and will run through mid-September. Finnish law does not require vehicles on the road to have a driver, making it the perfect place to get permission to test the Easymile EZ-10 electric mini-buses. "This is actually a really big deal right now," Harri Santamala, project manager at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and the test project lead, told a local news outlet. SEE: When will we get driverless cars?