Gizmos & Gadgets: Ride an Autonomous Bus on Helsinki Streets

August 19, 2016 – It’s official. Autonomous bus service is starting to show up on urban streets with Helsinki, Finland launching a small fleet of two French-built, EasyMile EZ10, 9-passenger electric vehicles (EV). Unlike past launches of autonomous vehicles, these buses will operate on regular streets integrating with normal commuter traffic. The buses will operate in the Hernesaari district of Finland’s capital city negotiating traffic and pedestrians from now until mid-September as a test. If successful the program will be expanded.

The buses have a cruising speed of 10 kilometers (6 miles) per hour. States Harri Santamala, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, they will operate as “a feeder service for high-volume buses…..the mini-bus would know when the connecting service is coming and it would get you there on time.”

The EasyMile pilot project is a joint venture between France’s Ligier and India’s Robosoft. The two companies have been operating autonomous shuttles at European amusement parks with a 1.5 million passenger success rate so far.

Santamala calls this a big deal stating, “There’s no more than a handful of these kinds of street traffic trials taking place, if that,” and considers the Hernesaari traffic environment will provide the first real-world challenge for autonomous EVs.

Unlike some other test autonomous vehicle services operating today, the EasyMile pilot is not linked to a smartphone app to hail a ride. A service like this was unsuccessfully tested in Helsinki last year and was shut down because of low ridership. But a ride-hailing EV bus service which I wrote about back in June introduced Olli, an electric bus operating on-demand service to Washington, DC suburb, and soon is to be launched in Miami.

So it appears that the autonomous EV has arrived and we should see many more such experiments eventually leading to permanent integration of this technology into urban transit globally.

Related articles across the web

• Self-driving buses take to roads alongside commuter traffic in Helsinki
• EasyMile vehicles will be ferrying passengers around Helsinki
• Those Self-Driving Buses Are My God So Slow