The pilot transport program will be expanded in the coming months. An electric, driverless bus will hit the streets of the Netherlands tomorrow, Thursday, and will be available to the public, carrying six passengers along a 200-meter stretch of road.
The WePod, one of many to be launched in the coming years, will be going back and forth to the central Dutch agricultural town of Wageningen. Several studies of so-called autonomous vehicles are underway in the auto and technology industries, from Tesla's Model S sedan, which can change lanes with minimal intervention from the driver, to Google and Daimler's plans to introduce driverless vehicles.
The pilot transportation program will be expanded in the coming months and will eventually be used as a means of public transportation along a 6-kilometer route in the city, said Iris van Cattenburch of Connekt, a group of companies developing sustainable public transportation.
In April, the Netherlands will conduct its first autonomous vehicle trial by testing driverless semi-trucks at the Port of Rotterdam, where autonomous road trains will ship cargo from Europe’s largest port across the continent from 2019. The WePod test, developed in collaboration with Delft Technical University for around €3 million ($3.3 million), will be streamed live on https://wepods.com/at 2:15 p.m. local time (1:15 p.m. GMT). When fully operational, the WePods will travel at a speed of 15.5 miles per hour.
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