ULTra Robo-Taxi

irksome writes: "Found a link on msnbc about a driver-less taxi pod. According to the article, the vehicle has begun road tests in the city of Cardiff, Wales. The pod, known as ULTra (Urban Light Transport) could make driver-free transport a reality and not just the stuff of futuristic fantasy."

Comments

Whooo

[delta407]

Wow, they plant to make thirty pods in two years for a price of $65 million. Great, and they're battery operated. Plus, they move at a whopping 25 miles per hour. I feel like this could easily become the sweeping revolution in mass transit.

"Passengers will 'hail' the pod from a designated stop, where they select the required destination along a set route." Sort of like a bus. Except buses don't cost $2 million to build, and they seat more than four passengers... additionally, they expect a trip to cost as much as a bus, except buses are cheaper, higher capacity, don't require a renovation of an infrastructure, already available, and in many cases faster than these pods.

Seriously, though, what if someone swipes the battery, smashes the windshield, or perhaps "disables" the potentially raised rail? Who would get sued? Or would they make you sign a disclaimer (the "you can't touch us if you get killed" variety)?

Basically, what I'm seeing is that we'd be better off *not* investing in these things: too expensive for too small of a gain.

Re:Whooo

[squiggleslash]

That's one way of looking at it.

The other is as an experiment. There are going to be limitations, and the first version is going to be expensive, but what's remarkable is how cheap it is for an early prototype system, not how expensive it is for a "replacement" for the car/bus/motorcycle/taxi/whatever.

As the kinks are worked out while a real system is loose on real roads, you should see a real decrease in cost, especially as others take up the same ideas. Remember, the cost is high for the system, but the system involves upgrading infrastructure and building a tiny number of vehicles. A city that's upgrading its infrastructure anyway, and a populace that's buying more and more of these things, should see costs plummet.

And 25MpH... That's about twice the average speed of a bus in most cities. Seriously - look it up. In Oxford, where I came from, they did a survey in the mid eighties and found that busses there were driving at an average 8-15MpH while in service!

Umm. This is a repeat.

[SWPadnos]

Hmmm. Looks suspiciously like this.

I guess it takes a while for MSN to get old news from the BBC.

It's been a long time coming. . .

[Bagheera]

This looks like another take on the Ultra-Light Rail Vehicle concept that's been around for a long time now. Basically replacing the "light" rails and trollies we're used to from a lot of cities with really light vehicles running on even lighter rails. Removing something the size and mass of a locomotive and replacing it with something the size of a Honda Civic with even lower mass.

From a pure engineering standpoint, these things are a great idea and are a much better solution to the "public" transit (as opposed to "Mass" transit as we're saddled with now) problem. The rails are relatively inexpensive to fabricate. They're much less intrusive. They can be switched easily to give better coverage. And the vehicles are light, quiet, and cheap.

The vandalism problem is probably the hardest to solve. And the obvious problem of pulling "unusable" vehicles out of service. Still, it's nice to see a city willing to try a project like this.