An autonomous vehicle collided with a lorry yesterday morning at Biopolis Drive in the one-north business district area during test drive. The self-driving car, owned by nuTonomy, was on a test drive when the incident took place.
In a Facebook post published by the Land Transport Authority (LTA), the incident took place at 9.28am. It said that the test vehicle was changing lanes when it collided with a lorry, and no casualties were involved. The police are currently investigating the cause of the incident.
The company has issued a statement that the self-driving car was conducting on-road testing and that there were no injuries involved. The vehicle had two engineers onboard at the time of the incident with one of them behind the wheel as a safety driver, and was traveling at a low speed at the time of the incident. The company also remarked that it was cooperating fully with the investigation by the Singapore Traffic Police and LTA. It is inspecting the reason behind the incident and that whether the safety driver took over control of the car at the time of the crash.
This is first such report involving a self-driving car in Singapore. In US, there have been several minor accidents involving Google’s self-driving cars, the last one occurred few weeks back in Mountain View.
NuTonomy launched first-ever public trial of autonomous robo-taxi this August beating all others to the punch, which began within Singapore’s 2.5 sq. km. business district, One North. Several weeks later, NuTonomy announced its collaboration with Southeast Asian ride-hailing service Grab to allow the latter’s riders to hail self-driving taxis. The three-year old Singapore-based startup is gearing up for a full commercial launch in 2018 and plans to deploy 100 taxis in the island-nation. It is reportedly in conversation with potential investors to raise fresh funds, and the new round is expected to close in first-half of next year.
