58 Market analysis of the trends affecting the future of personal mobility predict that consumer ownership of vehicles will decline over the decades to come, with the use of public or shared transportation services to grow in its place. That indicates a potentially enormous market for sustainable, autonomous commuter transport. We have reported on different robotaxi solutions over the years that aim to serve such a market, although to date they have been limited in their use to tightly controlled and fenced-in campus-like areas or events. A major reason for that is that road safety regulations list an exhaustive number of tests that have to be passed before an autonomous vehicle can be allowed to operate commercially on public roads. They go beyond the SAE levels of autonomy and ISO 26262, and not all OEMs are necessarily wellpractised in how to make a robotaxi comply with such standards. However, a new robotaxi project aimed at meeting not only road safety regulations but expected future environmental and mobility-as-aservice (MaaS) demands has emerged in a partnership between automotive group WorldAutoSteel and engineering consultancy Ricardo. While the latter is well-known among automotive engineers, the former is a research consortium of the world’s 18 largest automotive steel producers, spanning East Asia, Europe and the Americas. As George Coates, technical director at WorldAutoSteel, explains, “We fund research projects aimed at defining Rory Jackson reports on this project that uses different steels to produce an autonomous, eco-friendly taxi that meets stringent road safety regulations Follow this cab August/September 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology
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