When MIT startup nuTonomy announced that it had put self-driving cabs on the streets of Singapore, it was clear why they had chosen the tiny island nation as a test market.
“In order, it’s the regulatory environment, it’s the driving climate, it’s the infrastructure and the weather. Those are the main things. There are other things like traffic density, but that ties into the driving climate. You can have dense traffic but if people are adhering to the rules of the roads, you’ll be alright,” said Karl Iagnemma, CEO of nuTonomy.
While Singaporeans tend to abide by the rules, drivers in other Asian cities are notorious for their alternative approach to navigating the roads. Iagnemma uses India as an example, which is known for its chaotic traffic snarls. The question at hand then, is if Singapore’s driving climate is ideal for autonomous vehicles -- will the technology ever work in cities that don’t have solid infrastructure and law-abiding drivers?
“Cities like New Delhi for example, where traffic is dense and it’s a more fluid driving environment, that’s hard for self-driving technology to deal with,” he said -- which makes sense because autonomous vehicles are run by computers, which operates based on a set of rules.
Since self-driving technology is bound to an idea of structure, it’s simply easier to deploy the tech in a structured environment -- quite like the one that Singapore has.
At the end of the day, said Iagnemma, nuTonomy is running software computer code that makes decisions based on cues that it gets from the environment. So what would happen if nuTonomy puts its cars on the roads of India?
“The less structure that’s available, the more you have to rely on human contextualized reasoning and decision making, and that’s really hard. You have to drive based on your past experience and your intuition. So [if we put our cars on the roads in India], the core technology will be similar -- but it will require a more advanced evolution of technology to perform less structured contextualized reasoning,” he said.
In simpler words, the self-driving technology for the roads of say Vietnam, where drivers are known to be exceptionally unruly, just isn’t ready yet. The focus now, according to Iagnemma, is to expand to cities with a similar environment to Singapore.
Photo courtesy of nuTonomy
“We know we want to launch in Singapore, but we are really focused on building a global solution, one that’s scalable, so we’re in conversation with a bunch of other cities. We’re trying to determine at the moment, ‘What’s the next Singapore?’”
The Southeast Asian country is quite progressive when it comes to its approach to alleviating congested roads. It employs a digital road pricing system that charges drivers for access into the central parts of town and has also enforced strict requirements when it comes to private car ownership -- which require citizens to bid for expensive licenses.
The government’s latest pledge to improving road conditions is to use self-driving technology as a first and last mile solution, to be paired with their existing public transport network. How it will work is nuTonomy’s self-driving cabs will ferry passengers from their home to the metro, then take them from the station to their final destination.
