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Nissan Announces Plans For Driverless Ride-Hailing Services
Automakers are leveraging expertise in self-driving functions for mass-market cars to develop mobility services, as they battle with tech firms such as Alphabet Inc and Uber Technologies Inc.
Nissan Motor Co Ltd. has announced that it plans to launch driverless ride-hailing and ride-sharing services in the coming years.
The automaker wants to look beyond making and selling cars to survive an industry being quickly transformed by new services.
Automakers are leveraging expertise in self-driving functions for mass-market cars to develop mobility services, as they battle with tech firms such as Alphabet Inc and Uber Technologies Inc.
There has been increased demand for "pay-per-ride" market which threatens to hit the need for car ownership.
Ogi Redzic, head of Nissan-Renault's Connected Vehicles and Mobility Services division, said the alliance would start self-driving services based on its electric cars "certainly within 10 years," although not likely before 2020.
"We think that the big opportunity for us is in automation, electric vehicles and ride-sharing and hailing together," Redzic said in an interview with Reuters.
Nissan and Renault SA will join a small group of automakers striving to enter the ride-hailing market. Goldman Sachs estimates that the ride-hailing market would grow eightfold by 2030 to be five times the size of the current taxi market.
The alliance is developing the system with Japanese game software maker DeNA Co Ltd and French public transport operator Transdev SA. The system in which ride-hailing service would run on pre-mapped courses with predetermined pick-up and drop-off points.
Redzic said to market a self-driving service; laws need to evolve to allow driverless cars on roads. Presently, most global rules do not authorise vehicles to operate on regular roads without a driver.
DriveSpark Thinks!
Nissan is one of the mass market players who is looking to enter the lucrative ride-hailing services, especially the driverless service. The ride-hailing service in the recent past has been on the upswing, and self-driving taxis could become a norm sooner than later.
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