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Officials from Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority (RTA)
displayed two cube-shaped vehicles built by U.S.-based Next
Future Transportation company in Italy as they spun around on a
main street in Dubai.
Passersby stopped to try out the six-seat vehicles and question
the Italian engineers overseeing the test.
RTA officials said they have allocated 1.5 million dirhams
($410,000) for further research and development of the vehicles,
which Dubai hopes to use for local transportation under the
city's 2030 Dubai Future Accelerators, which aims to make 25
percent of daily transportation self-driven.
"The goal is to develop these two research vehicles," Khaled
al-Awadhi, director of Automated Collection Systems at the RTA,
said.
"These tests are aimed at developing the performance of these
vehicles," he added, without giving details on the cost of the
project.
He said several projects were being developed, including
self-driving buses and a marine transportation system.
The RTA says the autonomous pods would travel on pre-programmed
routes in the first few years, but would eventually become
accessible for pick up from home using a mobile telephone
application. No date was provided for the start of either
service. RTA officials said they hoped to have a more solid plan
for the program by the end of 2018 or early 2019.
The vehicles are powered by electricity and have a top speed of
80 kms (50 miles) per hour.
Dubai last year unveiled plans for a "flying taxi".
(Writing by Sami Aboudi; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
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