Singapore has selected Delphi to provide a fleet of automated taxis in a pilot test, beginning later... [+]
To the surprise of almost no one, the probable future of urban transportation will make its world debut in Singapore in 2017. The island city-state has all the ingredients to make it the ideal proving ground for this new approach to personal mobility. While local authorities will handle the necessary infrastructure, tier-one automotive supplier Delphi and Singapore-based startup nuTonomy have been selected to lead the vehicle technology side of the pilot program that will run from 2017 through 2019.
Update: Story revised to reflect that nuTonomy has also been selected to participate in the upcoming trials.
Delphi and the Singapore Land Transport Authority began discussions following the supplier’s successful transcontinental run in an autonomous
“We created the services business unit to focus on a couple of things. One is connected services, all of the off-board, off-vehicle analytics that we do, but one of the biggest parts of it automated driving,” said Glen De Vos, vice president of Delphi’s services business unit. “A lot has happened in the year since we did that cross-country drive, I can’t think of a period of time in the automotive industry when there has been more going on.”
Singapore has selected Delphi to provide a fleet of automated taxis in a pilot test, beginning later... [+]
De Vos was referring to the increasingly rapid advancements in trying to get autonomous driving capability ready for real-world deployment. Tech companies, regulators and manufacturers all see this technology as having the greatest potential to impact the nature of personal mobility since the launch of the Ford Model T in 1908. In combination with electric powertrains, connectivity and cloud services, automation could conceivably slash the injuries and fatalities resulting from crashes while improving traffic flow and reducing energy use.
But there is still much to be learned before the urban mobility utopia can be a reality and that’s the purpose of this program in Singapore. As mentioned, this is a near ideal location to try out automated mobility on-demand (AMOD). Singapore is an island city-state with a densely packed urban population of 5.4 million people in an area of 277 square miles or roughly double the size of Detroit. It’s a fairly affluent nation with well developed and maintained infrastructure and warm weather year-round.
An early test of autonomous vehicles in Singapore bypasses the weather related issues that current autonomous systems face and excellent infrastructure will make it easier for the vehicles to navigate around the test area. Singapore residents frequently take taxis to get around town and even to get to mass transit stations.
The phase one pilot program will take place in the One North of the island with six Delphi vehicles that are yet to be built. According to De Vos, Delphi engineers expect to select a base vehicle soon and are hoping to use an electric vehicle with seating for four to six people. So far, Delphi has used the Audi SQ5 crossover as its development platform, but that vehicle has more performance than needed for this application where speeds are not expected to exceed 25 to 30 mph. The
Singapore-based startup nuTonomy has already been testing its own home-grown autonomous vehicle technology on the streets of the city for some time. nuTonomy hopes to have its own fleet of five to 10 cars running as part of a mobility service by 2018.
Following completion of the pilot phase at the end of 2019, Singapore is planning a second larger deployment, hopefully using a vehicle that has been specifically designed for autonomous driving.
At the launch of the pilot phase, the six vehicle fleet will carry passengers along three pre-defined routes that each end at a transit station in the North Park region. Delphi has already begun the process of generating high-fidelity 3D maps of the routes that cover a total of about five miles. Over the course of the program as the vehicle capability and safety is demonstrated, the plan is to offer full point-to-point travel to anywhere in the test region. Safety drivers will be on board the vehicles to monitor performance and take over in the event of a problem. Toward the end of the pilot, Delphi hopes to start operating the vehicles without a safety driver.
The services business unit doesn’t plan to run all aspects of AMOD services but will integrate capabilities from several partners into its cloud mobility ecosystem. That will include the fleet management, connectivity, and the autonomous technologies.
De Vos commented on the sensing technologies that will be used in the Singapore pilot vehicles. While acknowledging that Tesla’s AutoPilot system was a very capable driver assistance system, Delphi doesn’t believe that a monovision camera, radar and ultrasonic sensors provide a sufficiently robust combination of perception technologies for full autonomy in all conditions.
Delphi plans to continue using a multi-modal sensing strategy of lidar, cameras, short and long-range radar, inertial sensors and V2X communications to function in even extreme weather conditions. All of this information is fused into a perception model and the vehicle localized within that model so that it knows where other vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians are in relation to it.
Delphi began with the spin-off of
The initial test route that will be used by Delphi's autonomous test vehicles in Singapore (Image... [+]
Through its integration efforts on the Singapore AMOD system, Delphi will be collecting a huge amount of data to help it understand all aspects of the user experience. To date, there is no real-world data on how end-users will feel about using such a system. Will they be comfortable and excited? Or anxious about riding in an autonomous vehicle?
In addition to moving people around, autonomous vehicles can play an important part in logistics to free up people’s time for other activities. For example an autonomous vehicle could stop by the cleaners to pick up laundry, get an order of groceries and then pick up a passenger to take them home so that they don’t have to make those trips.
“In the U.S. the average cost of a car trip after factoring in the vehicle, fuel, insurance and parking is $0.90 to $1.00 per mile,” added De Vos. “In a city like New York with its expensive and limited parking that jumps to $3.00+ per mile. We believe that with AMOD we can cut that to $2 or even $1 when fully deployed.”
“The sooner you get to dedicated autonomous vehicles, the sooner you get the economic benefits.”
As the cost per trip goes down in future years, the technology will enable the exploration of a range of new services that haven’t even been thought of yet. Even without those services, the societal benefits of eliminating a large proportion of the more than one million road fatalities that happen around the world every year will likely be worth the effort to get there.
While Singapore is a great place to start with on-demand mobility, it won’t have an exclusive. Delphi hopes to launch similar pilot programs in at least two locations in the U.S. as well as in Europe within the next two years.
Delphi traces its history back to the Charles Kettering’s Delco lab in the early years of the automobile where he and his team created the first practical electric self-starter. In the following decades, under Kettering’s engineering leadership at GM, countless innovations emerged. Delphi went through a very rough time after being separated from GM including a five-year long bankruptcy reorganization. The current smaller but more focused Delphi clearly hopes to leverage its growing expertise to play a big part in the next phase of the automobile.
The author is a senior analyst on the Transportation Efficiencies team at Navigant Research
