London Taxi Company To Produce Autonomous Cars

London Taxi Company To Produce Autonomous Cars

Earlier this month London's largest Taxi company signed an agreement with software manufacturer Oxbotica to begin production of a fleet of self-driving taxis. Addison Lee Group has over 5000 taxis currently operating in and around London and is the most established and respected taxi line in the city and Oxbotica was recently selected to provide materials for the UK Mars rover project.

Addison Lee’s chief executive officer Andy Boland said in a recent statement "Urban transport will change beyond recognition in the next 10 years with the introduction of self-driving services. This will put us at the very forefront of this change." 

Both companies have reported that have been no discussions of financial compensation , as they are concentrating on pooling their resources to get the project off the ground by their estimated date of 2021. 

Oxbotica’s chief executive officer Graeme Smith said in a recent interview "We will eventually work out some sort of commercial arrangement, but we don’t feel the need to have those discussions first." 

Oxbotica has put a lot of resources into the endeavor, having recently hired Fraser Robinson onto their board. Fraser was an executive with Uber why presumably has ties to their self-driving program in the US. Both Oxbotica and Addison Lee are banking on legislation in the UK changing over the next few years, as current laws state that all vehicles must be operated by a human driver. Hopefully the program proves successful, as it could certainly reduce the number of collisions around London's busy streets. At this time a traffic accident at the wrong time and place has the ability to bring a quarter of the commuters in the city to a crawl.

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Written By: Todd Hendrickson
Source: Bloomberg