Singapore Land Transport Authority (LTA) has selected Delphi Automotive PLC as a strategic partner to implement autonomous mobility concepts, recognizing Delphi’s leading technologies in advanced safety and automated software.
Delphi will provide a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles and will develop a cloud-based mobility-on-demand software (AMoD) suite, opening up new potential autonomous markets for Delphi’s customers. They will conduct a trial of an urban, point-to-point, low-speed, autonomous, mobility-on-demand service in Singapore’s Autonomous Vehicles Test Bed located at one-north, a business park in the western area of the city.
Kevin Clark, president and chief executive officer, Delphi said,
We are honored to partner with the Singapore LTA on advancing innovative mobility systems, which will put Singapore at the forefront of autonomous vehicle adoption. This is a great recognition of Delphi’s leadership in advanced safety technologies, automated software, systems integration, as well as our ability to drive these mobility solutions forward for our customers.
A cab ride in a dense urban area can normally cost $3 to 4 a mile. Delphi’s vice president of engineering Glen DeVos said in an interview that they we can get to 90 cents a mile with an automated vehicle. That drops the price of transporting goods and people, and allows for the costs of automated driving systems to be spread over hours of operation and multiple users.
To start with, these cars will have drivers so that if the piloting systems fail, drivers can drive. However by 2019 or 2020, they will remove drivers from the car. The Singapore LTA pilot program will last for three years with plans to transition into an operational service by 2022 time frame. Other pilots are planned by Delphi for locations in North America and Europe in the future.
Delphi’s technology solution is vehicle agnostic and can be applied in passenger cars, buses, commercial vehicles, purpose-built mobility pods and electric vehicles. AVs provide the opportunity to facilitate efficient urban and suburban vehicle sharing, autonomous bus or taxi services, logistics and long-distance truck platooning.
Delphi is working with other companies, including Israel’s Mobileye NV, to develop the sensor systems to enable vehicles to operate autonomously. The Singapore Land Transit Authority will supply infrastructure to help vehicles navigate safely. Delphi is doing its own mapping, but DeVos said,
We are looking at mapping alternatives including a service offered by Mobileye. The Singapore project was deliberately kept to a small scale. We are going to do it incrementally in a very controlled manner.
