Argo AI, a self driving start-up supported by Ford and Volkswagen, announced last week that it was testing its driverless service in Miami, Florida and Austin, Texas It is reported that Argo has been testing its fourth generation driverless vehicle technology in the above two places and Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Detroit and California in the past few years. During this period, Argo employees still supervise the passenger seat to fully verify its driverless online car Hailing service before opening to the public.
Data map (from Argo AI official website)
After a period of integration, only a few enterprises with abundant funds are left in the autonomous vehicle industry to promote this future vision, so as to come up with solutions to the traffic safety problems that have plagued the people for decades.
Through years of efforts, Argo also plans to use its fifth generation automatic driving technology from 2025 and work with Volkswagen to launch micro transportation and delivery services in Germany. Competitors in this field also include start-ups such as waymo, cruise and motional.
Even so, Argo prides itself on being the first company to conduct driverless technology testing in both cities at the same time and emphasizes that its vehicles will operate "during the day" - after all, only cruise test vehicles are currently allowed to operate at night in San Francisco.
Brygo, the founder and CEO of the company, has chosen two of the busiest auto driving technologies in the United States, namely, brygo and salesy, to verify the safety of pedestrians in the busy traffic environment.
From the first day, they have focused on overcoming this problem, which is also the market area with the strongest customer demand. The good news is that the company's autonomous platform is steadily advancing to expand sustainable intelligent business.
With the maturity of technology, this move also means an important moment for driverless enterprises. Even if there is no safety officer on site to take over, the automatic driving platform can properly deal with problems.
Argo Goes Driverless in Miami and Austin（via）
However, at this stage, Argo employees will still be on standby in the passenger seat of the test vehicle. Throughout the market, there are only a few self driving online car Hailing companies that have deployed L4 pure driverless vehicles on public roads.
For example, waymo, a subsidiary of Google's parent company alphabet, has been operating its L4 autonomous vehicle in the suburbs of Phoenix for many years (including providing ride services for paying customers).
Cruise, a subsidiary of GM holdings, also operates L4 online car hailing in San Francisco, but has not yet provided a paid experience. Hyundai's joint venture with APTIV, motional, is testing its L4 class autonomous vehicle in Las Vegas.
Yandex, a Russian technology giant, had also been tested during CES 2020, but closed its business in the United States after the outbreak of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. At the end of 2020, baidu also tested the automatic driving technology without on-board safety officers in China.
Finally, Argo said it would cooperate with LYFT to launch commercial bus service (starting in Austin and Miami), and work with Wal Mart to carry out automatic delivery service in Washington, D.C.