South Korea to build world’s largest self-driving car testing facility

South Korea is building a 36-hectare self-driving car testing facility. The site, K-City, is to be taken into use in October and will include special bus lanes, zones for autonomous parking and motorways.

The test track should open in part in October. The South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport will open the entire test facility in the first half of 2018 and will cost about 9 million euros. A large number of South Korean companies such as Samsung, SK Telecom, Naver, Hyundai and Kia are likely to start using the test facility. That reports the website BusinessKorea.

The South Korean Ministry is building the test facility based on the intelligent transportation system of the Korean Transportation Safety Authority. This is a collection of systems that are used in South Korea, among other things, on highways to better spread traffic and increase safety. The use of this at K-City is intended to make the experiences on the test roads as authentic as possible.

South Korea recently announced that it plans to produce cars that can drive fully autonomously by 2020, but will still require a driver’s backup. The country wants to give a major boost to the self-driving car industry. To this end, the South Korean government recently issued about twenty permits for test projects of self-driving cars. Samsung received a license, among other things. The company recently received permission to test a self-driving car on public roads.

Image: BusinessKorea