Skip to main content

Driverless buses arrive in Paris

While much of the talk recently has been about self-driving cars tootling about towns, an increasing number of companies have been impressing city governments with their designs for self-driving shuttle buses.

The latest metropolis to welcome such technology to its streets is Paris, a place whose ongoing struggle with smog has prompted it to look ever more closely at electric-operated public transportation solutions. And autonomous ones, at that.

Recommended Videos

It’s admittedly a tentative start, with only two “EZ10” buses trundling along a designated lane connecting Lyon and Austerlitz stations in central Paris – a distance of just over half a mile (1 km). However, the three-month trial, which started on Monday and offers free rides seven days a week, will be expanded to other locations in the French capital later this year.

“Autonomous vehicles represent a revolution for every city on the planet [that] will change our urban environment and public space in a spectacular fashion over the next 20 years,” Jean-Louis Missika, the city’s deputy mayor, told AFP.

Easy Mile

Built by French firm EasyMile, the small EZ10 vehicle can hold up to 12 people, and uses cameras, lasers, and GPS to get around. With a top speed of only 12 mph (20 kmh), the bus is better suited for short trips between facilities within particular locations, such as airports, shopping malls, and amusement parks. Indeed, EasyMile itself describes the EZ10 as ideal for covering “short distances and predefined routes in multi-use environments.”

Driverless bus technology is gaining recognition in cities around the world. EasyMile’s technology, for example, has also come to the attention of officials in Helsinki, Finland, and another trial using the EZ10 is set to begin soon in Darwin, Australia.

Another French company, Navya, recently introduced its diminutive self-driving shuttle bus to the streets of Las Vegas, while Singapore and China have been experimenting with designs a whole lot bigger.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Waymo’s robotaxis are rolling into another U.S. city
A Waymo driverless car.

Waymo has been testing its driverless cars in Miami intermittently for the last five years, but now it’s making serious moves to launch a robotaxi service there.

The Alphabet-owned company revealed on Thursday that it’ll start testing its Jaguar I-PACE autonomous cars on the streets of the city early next year, with the aim of launching a robotaxi service for residents and visitors via the Waymo One app in 2026.

Read more
Waymo, Nexar present AI-based study to protect ‘vulnerable’ road users
waymo data vulnerable road users ml still  1 ea18c3

Robotaxi operator Waymo says its partnership with Nexar, a machine-learning tech firm dedicated to improving road safety, has yielded the largest dataset of its kind in the U.S., which will help inform the driving of its own automated vehicles.

As part of its latest research with Nexar, Waymo has reconstructed hundreds of crashes involving what it calls ‘vulnerable road users’ (VRUs), such as pedestrians walking through crosswalks, biyclists in city streets, or high-speed motorcycle riders on highways.

Read more
Are self-driving cars the death of car ownership?
Tesla Cybercab at night

Self-driving cars are coming. It remains to be seen how long that will take. Plenty of vehicles can more or less drive themselves on highways, but for now, they still can't completely reliably drive themselves on all streets, in all conditions, taking into account all different variables. One thing is clear, though: the tech industry sees autonomous driving as the future of personal transportation, and they're spending billions to reach that goal.

But what happens when we get there? Tesla made headlines for not only announcing its new Cybercab fully autonomous vehicle, but simultaneously claiming that customers will be able to buy one. That's right, at least if Tesla is to be believed, the Cybercab doesn't necessarily represent Tesla building its own Uber-killing fleet of self-driving cars, but instead giving people the ownership over the self-driving car industry.

Read more