30 March 2017

Dubai’s plans to embrace driverless vehicle technology by the year 2030 could free up around half of the land dedicated to car parking spaces to be used for new urban development projects, the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) said in a press statement issued on Wednesday to coincide with the Global Manufacturing and Industrialisation Summit (GMIS) taking place in Abu Dhabi.

The emirate’s authorities have set an ambitious goal that one in four journeys in Dubai will be driverless by 2030 and this will include fully autonomous buses, the metro, boats, trams, taxis and even autonomous aircraft.

The RTA’s director general, Mattar Al Tayer, told delegates at GMIS that self-driving transport will become a reality "in five to 10 years”, adding that the technology is currently being tested in several countries such as Singapore, the United States and Britain.

Al Tayer added that driverless car technology will also lead to:
- 12 percent reduction in the Emirate’s carbon footprint
- 45 percent reduction in mobility costs
- 12 percent increase in transport safety

However, the big news is the opportunity it presents for property developers. “As a result of the RTA’s transportation strategy… 50 percent of car parking spaces will not be needed and can be used for other urban development projects,” the RTA said in a press release.

Talk about driverless cars coming to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been spoken about by government and industry officials for a while. Dubai’s RTA has announced last month it agreed to buy 200 electric vehicles from Tesla Inc that would fit to be used without drivers.

Al Tayer also said that within ten years an estimated 30 percent of commuters will share cars, leading to a significant reduction in the number of private cars on Dubai’s roads. He claimed that a single car sharing arrangement will replace between 9 and 13 vehicles, something he said would not be popular with car manufacturers.

The CEO of the ride hailing service Careem said the company will be ready to modify its technology to adapt to new driverless cars technology when the new innovation turns into a reality.

"We will not build the hardware for these driverless vehicles and we will not build the operating system for the driverless cars but we will bring the best services to make it accessible to customers," Mudassir Sheikha, CEO and co-founder of Careem said in his speech at the GMIS.

"The likes of Volvo and others would build the hardware and let the likes of google and others build the software and then let us build the service layer," he added.

Careem's rival Uber has last Saturday suspended its pilot program for driverless cars after a vehicle equipped with the technology crashed on a roadway in Arizona in the United States. The accident was the latest involving a self-driving vehicle operated by several companies experimenting with autonomous vehicles.

Further reading:




© Express 2017