Driverless taxi has ‘small prang’

Driverless taxi’s being trialled in Singapore have had their first collision.

The self-driving taxi project was launched in August by US driverless software start-up nuTonomy. A spokesperson told the BBC, ‘the car clipped a small lorry while driving at around four miles per hour’ and described the incident as a ‘small prang’ causing only minor damage with no injuries.

The spokesperson from nuTonomy continued to say, ‘given this was a trial, small accidents were not unexpected and that the idea of the testing was to learn from what went wrong.’

On another note nuTonomy has recently partnered with southeast Asia Uber rival, Grab. The company offers a ride hailing service throughout 30 cities within the southeast Asia region.

Karl Iagnemma, chief executive and co-founder of nuTonomy, said ‘we’re confident the it’s time to put Grab customers in our cars and the valuable lessons learned from this pilot are going to help us for our commercial launch in 2018.’

Anthony Tan, Grab’s chief executive, said ‘We look forward to collaborating with nuTonomy to research this future mobility solution as part of our growing platform of mobility offerings.’