Renault-Nissan Alliance and Transdev to develop driverless vehicle fleet system for future public and on-demand transportation
27 February 2017
The Renault-Nissan Alliance and Transdev have agreed to explore the joint development of mobility services with fleets of electric driverless vehicles for public and on-demand transportation. The companies will collaborate to develop a comprehensive, modular transportation system to enable clients to book rides, and mobility operators to monitor and operate self-driving car fleets.
The research will initially include field tests in Paris-Saclay with Renault ZOEs, the leading electric vehicle in Europe, and Transdev’s on-demand dispatch, supervision and routing platform.
The future of mobility will be P.A.C.E.—Personalized, Autonomous, Connected and Electric. As a worldwide leader in public transport and on-demand shared services, we are committed to pioneer in mobility to always offer our clients the best solutions for their journeys. Our partnership with Renault-Nissan will reinforce our innovation capabilities and accelerate our time-to-market by combining our strengths with those of a global car manufacturer that shares the same willingness to enhance daily mobility to the benefit of clients.
—Yann Leriche, chief performance officer at Transdev
The Renault-Nissan Alliance has been forming partnerships to accelerate the development of advanced connected-car technologies and mobility services. These include a partnership with Microsoft to develop a single global platform that will improve the customer experience by making driving more intuitive, intelligent and fun; and a partnership with Japanese internet company DeNA to begin tests in Japan to develop driverless vehicles for commercial services.
Transdev is a pioneer in autonomous vehicle (AV) services. The company is engaged in a series of pilot AV deployments in multiple countries and is currently operating the world’s first commercial driverless service on EDF’s campus in Civaux, France. Transdev is accelerating the development of its AV operating system working with leading partners including Vedecom and SystemX.
A 70% owned subsidiary of Caisse des Dépôts in which Veolia has a shareholding of 30%. Transdev is a consultant for public transport authorities and supports them in everything from the pre-project phase to project management assistance to daily operation of public transport networks. With 83,000 employees in 19 countries, the group operates 43,000 vehicles and 22 tramway networks. In 2015, Transdev had a turnover of €6.6 billion.
This could be a long term (10+ years) project?
Maybe more groups should join in to enhance potential results?
Posted by: HarveyD | 27 February 2017 at 10:57 AM
The reason we even have self-drive is because Elon Musk is driving the technology. Look for Trump and The Republicans to slow down self-drive as well as the mileage requirements in the U.S. based on crying from GM, FCA, and Ford.
Posted by: Lad | 27 February 2017 at 03:00 PM
On demand ride-hailing driverless vehicles is indeed the future and Tesla will show the way when they start doing it with about 500,000 Model 3, S, and X all equipped with the needed driverless tech at the end of 2018.
I think by now most of the auto industry has realized that the driverless future is going to happen and that it will be spread to nearly all new cars in production in just 4 to 7 years because once you have the software working it is easy to scale it to all production cars because the tiny autonomous hardware components (like cameras and processors) do not require massive new factories to be build.
The old auto industry has to get the needed hardware into a production model ASAP because it is the fastest method and probably also the only realistic method for developing the needed driverless software. Tesla is the only auto maker that does that currently and this is why they are 3 to 4 years ahead of the competition with their launch of on demand ride-hailing driverless vehicles.
It is still not everybody in the old auto industry that realizes that BEVs are lower cost per mile than gassers when operated as on demand ride-hailing driverless vehicles. However, the Nissan/Renault/Transdev alliance gets it.
Nevertheless, initially I expect the on demand ride-hailing driverless tech to also being deployed on new gassers as it will take many more years to make the transition from gassers only to BEVs only than it will take to make the transition from human drivers only to nearly only on demand ride-hailing driverless vehicles.
In this regard there are three points in time that are relevant for the implementation of new and superior technology like driverless tech in the auto industry.
1) The day the technology is used for the first time among real customers. (Tesla Network starts at the end of 2018)
2) The day all new cars globally use the technology (Probably by 2027 all 90 million new cars made will be driverless)
3) The day the entire fleet of vehicles in the world has this technology (Probably by 2047 all 2 to 3 billion vehicles on planet earth will be driverless)
Posted by: Account Deleted | 27 February 2017 at 11:30 PM