Azernews.Az

Friday March 29 2024

Unmanned buses will appear in Azerbaijan

28 December 2018 18:21 (UTC+04:00)
Unmanned buses will appear in Azerbaijan

By Abdul Kerimkhanov

Unmanned urban passenger vehicles are planned to be launched in Baku until 2023.

This innovation is provided for in the “State Program for Road Safety in the Azerbaijan Republic for 2019-2023”.

Thus, the relevant government agencies were instructed to prepare proposals for the provision of pilot areas for the operation of autonomous passenger vehicles, including those for tourist and entertainment services.

The execution of the above works is entrusted to the Ministry of Transport, Communications and High Technologies. Among the structures that perform other work on the implementation of this project are the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Economy and Industry, the Baku Transport Agency, the State Agency Azerbaijan Roadways.

The world's first unmanned bus appeared in the Netherlands. The novelty is called Wepod and is already running on a small area on the university campus in the city of Wageningen. The maximum speed of the vehicle is 25 km per hour. The bus can carry no more than six people.

In motion, Wepod is driven by the power of an electric motor. Cruising the unmanned bus is about 100 kilometers. If the tests are considered successful, the route of the bus will be significantly increased. It is not excluded that Wepod will travel from the university to the city station with several stops.

For safe navigation, the bus uses cameras, radar and laser sensors. While driving the driver in the vehicle is missing. Wepod can take control of it remotely.

According to PwC, a completely unmanned transport infrastructure will be created in large cities by 2040, all vehicles will move without drivers, the need for which will disappear.

According to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the total market volume of unmanned vehicles may be about $ 42 billion by 2026. It is expected that the share of unmanned vehicles in the total structure of world sales will reach 12-13 percent. In other words, about 14 million unmanned vehicles will be released to the market, 500,000 of them will be completely autonomous. The McKinsey Global Institute is even more optimistic in its forecasts, assuming that the total share of unmanned vehicles (both fully autonomous and semi-autonomous) will reach 15-20 percent by 2025.

According to some estimates, in just a few decades, unmanned vehicles will allow mankind to save about $ 1 trillion in total and reduce the number of fatal accidents by 70 percent. Automation now allows you to significantly reduce accidents. For example, the auto concern Audi in 2016, said that due to the use of an emergency braking system in cars, the total number of passenger injuries over the past 5 years has decreased by almost 38 percent.

Among the companies that are currently actively involved in the development of unmanned vehicles are such large automakers as Volkswagen, General Motors (GM), Jaguar Land Rover, Toyota, Audi, BMW, and others. Google and Apple are also actively involved in this process.

---

Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz

Loading...
Latest See more