Driverless cars could soon be hurtling down New Zealand highways as proposals to trial futuristic vehicles are fast-tracked into law.
Transport Minister Simon Bridges is keen to cash in on potential opportunities for the futuristic vehicles, with two major technology companies in talks to trial autonomous vehicles here.
Rules around the use of driverless cars are being reviewed by the ministry, but Bridges said new legislation could be rushed through this year if the demand for testing was there.
Bridges didn't name the two interested companies, but said discussions were in progress but faced hurdles such as liability concerns, safety features and the mapping of New Zealand streets. "It's no slam dunk yet but it's a very alluring prospect."
Motor Industry Association chief executive David Crawford said the two companies were "major contenders".
Technology giant Google and multiple car manufacturers have invested millions bringing self-driving cars out of the realms of science fiction, while ride-sharing company Uber announced last week it was opening its own driverless car research facility in US city of Pittsburgh.
Vehicles are fitted with lasers that generate 3D images of the surrounding environment, combined with high-resolution GPS maps. The technology detects obstacles and tells the car how to respond. They are designed to work with existing Google maps and would work on any road that has already been mapped out. Bridges said he was actively pursuing more companies to come to New Zealand to test driverless cars, and will travel to Silicon Valley, and technology hubs in Japan and Korea to further research the technology.
"I'll be talking to various players in the tech space and telling them that New Zealand has a number of advantages as a test bed, including a wide range of driving conditions and areas, to relatively desirable regulations."
Kiwis As Guinea Pigs
(Economist 23 May 2014)
IN MEDICINE, trials are conducted on guinea pigs, rats, mice and rabbits. In digital businesses, tests are performed on New Zealanders. Their country is proving the perfect location for software firms, social networks and app developers discreetly to try out and refine their products. Take Microsoft, which last year made New Zealand its first test market for Sway, a new app that helps users create websites, and which has since been released into other markets. Other big technology firms, including Facebook and Yahoo, also use New Zealand as a development lab, as do games companies and small startups.
Firms preparing to launch new products need to discover and fix any bugs before releasing them, and to see whether their servers can support lots of users at the same time. It could prove fatal to a young firm if problems emerge only after the products are up for sale on the Apple and Google app stores. Developers could concentrate their testing on, say, one American state or city, but customers for digital products are so prone to sharing things among their social-media contacts that it would be hard to keep the trial under wraps for long, says Ivan Kirigin, a software entrepreneur.
New Zealand’s relative isolation means that if a product needs to be modified significantly to fix faults or make it more appealing to consumers, word of its teething troubles is less likely to spread, thereby discouraging customers elsewhere from trying the improved version. If a firm finds that a particular product, or a new feature added to an existing one, is a resounding flop in New Zealand, it can quietly be dropped without having much effect on the company’s overall reputation. Facebook tried offering Kiwis disappearing messages (in the vein of Snapchat) and a tool that let users pay a small fee to promote their status updates to friends. It abandoned plans to roll these out elsewhere after New Zealanders nixed them. “If you mess up and burn that market, it’s not that big of a deal,” says David Stewart of Fade, a photo-sharing firm.
Apart from being technophiles, and always up for a challenge, New Zealanders speak English and enjoy similar levels of affluence, and similar tastes, to Westerners in larger markets. The population of 4.5m is also large enough to provide decent enough sample sizes for product trials, says Mr Stewart.
Digital firms have other preferred locations for discreet trials. Chile is a popular test market for apps in Latin America: it is small and relatively affluent, and speaks Spanish, another world language. But few tech firms like having their test markets publicised. It is in no scientist’s interest for the guinea pigs to realise they are being experimented on.