In short- end of an experiment that wasn’t viable. There always had to be a ‘driver’ present to take over by law. So regardless of interest, running the teach and employing a human was never going to add up.
You’d have thought. One wet October day the staff were joking that ‘this won’t work, lets try anyway’. Bus stamped on the brakes as soon as a lorry came past and kicked up spray.
Surely it would make more sense in sparsely populated parts of the highlands where you could provide a service people want but the council finds too expensive to provide?
I take this bus a couple of times a week. I haven’t seen the ‘autonomous’ mode used in over a year. It’s quiet because it is overpriced, and sold on a gimick rather than the merits of the route.
In fairness, this was a new route so the disappointing ridership likely wasn’t due to the autonomy aspect.
The weirder part is calling the service “autonomous” when there were two employees on board - one to monitor the tech at all times and one to interact with passengers. Very labor intensive.
It was even weirder than that. The extra staff member just collected tickets and got bored. Tech staff were in addition. ‘Autonomous’ wasn’t used after an ‘incident’ in april that took a bus out of service.
Speculating, since the m8 hard shoulder was widened after that, and the bus squeezed up beside lorries on the hard shoulder with mm to spare…I think it clipped a lorry.
It’s not only people in Scotland that aren’t ready for the self-driving vehicle, we have one here in Texas; in one of the cities with the most traffic as Uber but most people aren’t comfortable riding in it. It’s a commercial vehicle, I doubt if they are going to publish the statistic to public
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Hmm.
The weirder part is calling the service “autonomous” when there were two employees on board - one to monitor the tech at all times and one to interact with passengers. Very labor intensive.