Coming soon?: Dubai preparing rules for driverless cars

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13 August 2017

Dubai is currently working on a series of rules and requirements for self-driving cars, Gulf News reported on Saturday.

The latest news further demonstrates the emirate’s desire to implement driverless vehicles. Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) had announced in June it will start trials of autonomous air taxis - or flying passenger drones - in the fourth quarter of this year.

The government had announced in February that one in four trips in Dubai will be driverless by year 2030. Last year, 8.8 per cent of road trips in Dubai were made on the driverless Dubai Metro, according to a Gulf News report published in February. The RTA expects that number to climb to 12.2 percent by 2030.

The RTA also agreed to buy 200 electric vehicles from Elon Musk’s Tesla company in February, which will be fit to be used as driverless cars.

Popular ride hailing service Careem has also said that it will be ready to modify its technology to adapt to the new driverless car technology when and if it gets implemented in Dubai.

“We will bring the best services to make (the driverless technology) accessible to customers," Mudassir Sheikha, CEO and co-founder of Careem said in his speech at the Global Manufacturing and Industrialisation Summit that took place in Abu Dhabi in March.

Careem’s rival Uber had already started a pilot program for driverless cars in the United States earlier this year, but the programme was suspended after one of the vehicles was involved in a crash.