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.

The media circus around driverless cars and their safety and ease of use could be distracting us from a more realistic technology -- driverless buses. These are already running in several locations. In California, a bus made by French company EasyMile is due to come into public service in the next year. There have already been several demonstration runs in Canada. At London Heathrow, four-person driverless pods have been shuttling passengers between Terminal 5 and a car park since 2011, which in driverless technology terms is practically the Jurassic age.

This story was originally published by Grist. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Our gas-guzzling car culture is about to change forever, but not necessarily for good. The shift from gasoline-power to electric, the rise of ridesharing, and the invention of self-driving vehicles will soon overhaul transportation. A new report, just published by the Greenlining Institute, a racial equity nonprofit, says these three revolutions will speed us into a gridlocked and polluted future unless we put the right policies in place.

It's already got driverless trains that take passengers from one terminal to another, now Gatwick is planning to introduce driverless buses that take them to their planes. The airport is trialling'electric-powered autonomous vehicles' for workers and says that if it's successful it could lead to driverless baggage trucks and transport buses for passengers and an'Uber-style' robot-car service for staff. The trial is thought to be the first of its kind for any airport in the world. Gatwick is trialling'electric-powered autonomous vehicles', pictured, for workers and says that if it's successful it could lead to driverless baggage trucks and transport buses for passengers and an'Uber-style' robot-car service for staff The airport says that its 300 airside vehicles are stationary 90 per cent of the time – as staff attend to aircraft and passengers - but that a trial of driverless cars will see workers shuttled between popular locations on the airfield when it starts later this summer. It said in a statement: 'The trial is thought to be the first of its kind for any airport in the world and - if successful and scaled up – could lead to airfield transport needs being met from a much smaller pool of autonomous vehicles, reducing the need for such large vehicle fleets, reducing emissions and saving on costs.

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?