The giant companies from Germany Daimler and Bocsh will test their self-driving taxi at the Silicon Valley in California.
Daimler, the world’s largest premium car maker and the largest automotive supplier Bosch, began interviewing the municipality in the Silicon Valley for a driverless taxi program called Robotaxi.
High costs force companies to work together for driverless taxi
Investments of global companies such as Google, Alphabet’s Waymo and Uber are continuing in the driverless car. The complex challenges of self-driving technology and high cost R&D budgets are causing giant corporations to collaborate to develop this technology.
Bosch and Daimler started to work together in April 2017 for produce driverless cars. The companies have collaborated in Stuttgart and Silicon Valley offices. While California is the first pilot region to be considered for a driverless taxi and new locations may be considered for testing in future.
For safety in driverless taxi vehicles, there will be a steer and a driver for the emergency conditions. If the driver is in an emergency, self driving mode will be able to disabled by computer.
During the test travel is free
During the test program, taxi drivers will take passengers to selected routes within the city free of charge. Daimler and Bosch have developed a driverless vehicle based on Nvidia Drive Pegasus, a US-based chipmaker Nvidia‘s artificial intelligence platform. Bosch continues to work on a computer brain. But for now, Bosch is using Nvidia’s Pegasus platform instead of its own computer brain will be done.
According to the agreement between the two firms, Daimler will provide facilities for the project and facilities for testing. Bosch will develop many sensors and control units used in the development phase of the project.
Uwe Keller, Daimler’s autonomous driving president:
We will use the Mercedes S and B class vehicles for driverless taxis, but we have not decided yet which car we will use for this project yet.
