China Built a Self-Driving... Something
The vehicle is a cross between a train and a bus, and it will soon travel t
Self-driving cars are either already here or perpetually a few years away, depending on who you ask. Companies like Tesla and Uber are working to build self-driving trucks to ferry cargo across the country. For any given mode of transportation, someone is trying to make it autonomous.
But for one Chinese company, it's not enough to make self-driving versions of the vehicles that already exist. Rail transit company CRRC invented a brand new type of vehicle and then made it self-driving.
The Autonomous Rail Rapid Transit (ART) is some kind of cross between a train and a bus or tram. The ART runs on roads like a bus, but only on designated paths like a tram. It's modular like a train, and carriages can be added or removed to accommodate different numbers of people. Each carriage can fit about 100 passengers.
And of course, the whole thing can run without a driver, although at least for now the ART comes with a stand-in driver for safety. The train-bus hybrid follows a pair of white lines painted on the street and contains a suite of sensors for avoiding obstacles.
The ART is also completely electric, and can get 15 miles on a 10 minute charge. The goal of the project is to create affordable mass transit for cities without enough money to build subways or tram tracks. Instead, the ART costs about as much as a bus, but the hybrid transit vehicle is more reliable and can fit many more people.
The first ART line is currently under construction in the city of Zhuzhou and is expected to become operational sometime in 2018. Now we just have to figure out what to call it.
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