Welcome to the future. If you are flying through London’s Heathrow Airport, be on the lookout for the UltraPRT pods, little electric vehicles that run on a closed road, taking passengers from terminal to terminal, all with no driver. And Heathrow is not alone. A town in Buckinghamshire is about to get a fleet of taxis that follow a similar model. Google’s autonomous research program has a fleet of very recognizable Priuses and Lexuses out on the road as well. The closed loop model used by Heathrow is how this technology will spread. Good stuff.
Driverless electric cars are here, more coming
Good. I hope the first consumer adopters of this capability will be the well-to-do douchebags and airheads who cause the most accidents while texting behind a wheel.
Meh. This was launched in 2011 and it is very limited. It goes from the T5 Business Parking to the T5 terminal. That’s it. A very small sub-set of the passengers that use T5 can even make use of it. It doesn’t go from terminal to terminal. That would be useful to everyone but that’s still done by buses with drivers.
As implemented at Heathrow, I don’t really see what advantage this has over a more familiar monorail system (like they use in T5 from the main terminal to the satellite gates). Maybe it has a bit more load-balancing capacity.
At the end of the day, a closed loop system between two terminals with the units running in separated channels is hardly “driverless cars”
Disagree. This is a testbed. It does not use rails to guide the cars. These are driverless cars. And more is coming. Do a search for the taxi system coming to Buckinghamshire. More closed loop, but driverless nonetheless. This approach is necessary to work out the bugs. This is a slow evolution that will ultimately lead to wider adoption. All that said, your comment is fair. I just think it dismisses the underlying value of having a place to work out the bugs with real people. There is value here.
Interesting story … and always good to see Robert Llewellyn, best known as the mechanoid “Kryten” in Red Dwarf.
Finally, all the idiots texting can finally keep their eyes and attention off the road. 🙂