Daimler and Bosch will soon test autonomous taxis

Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler AG says it wants to start testing autonomous taxis together with Bosch, also German. This does not concern modified existing vehicles.

That says Daimler CEO Wilko Stark in an interview with Automobilwoche, about which Reuters reports. He says test vehicles will be seen on the streets in the coming months, without specifying which country the tests will take place in. The CEO says he wants to be faster than Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, which is already testing 600 autonomous Chrysler Pacifica cars in 25 American cities.

The Daimler and Bosch cars must be part of a regular service from ‘the beginning of the next decade’, i.e. sometime after 2020. Stark continues: “In addition to highly autonomous cars with level 3, we also want to have fully autonomous vehicles, so level 4 and 5, on the street in the foreseeable future.”

According to Automobilwoche, the cars should have the appearance of a Mercedes V-class, but according to the CEO it is not a ‘craft solution’. By this he means that the cars were designed from the start as self-driving vehicles and that this functionality was not later added to existing vehicles.

Research firm Navigant recently published a report on the development of technology for self-driving cars. In it, it named General Motors as the frontrunner, followed by Waymo, Daimler-Bosch, Ford, Volkswagen Group and BMW. GM recently showed an autonomous car without a steering wheel and other controls.