Young company Amber Mobility is working on an autonomous car service together with its famous partners.
Virtually every company that is dealing with autonomous driving plans the application of robot taxis - vehicles that show up on demand to bring passengers to their destination and find charging stations on their own. The main idea behind robot taxis is to create space in urban areas. The vehicles shall either be under way or parking outside the city. Competition is heavy, nevertheless there are startups venturing forward in the field. After nuTonomy there is new startup joining the fray: Amber Mobility.
Old idea with new eagerness - Amber One
Amber Mobility is a startup from the Netherlands, the country where the founders initially want to realize their idea. For the longer term the Dutch want establish themselves as a driver service. The company questions the principle of the private automobile. Why own a car if it’s standing around 23 hours a day and is only causing costs. The concept isn’t new – it follows the Uber model in USA and arises from the Shared Economy.
Via smartphone the user shall be able to call a vehicle. In this case the model will be the Amber One, an autonomous electric car designed for people moving back and forth between their workplace and home.
Eindhoven 2018 AD
Amber Mobility plans to get started by offering the service to business people in the Dutch city Eindhoven. The project shall kickoff in 2018. In case of a successful pilot program the company wants to expand the project to the city Helmond. If the initial phase is successful further plans imply using the Amber One all over Europe. Until 2018 the concept is being analyzed within a beta test period.
Famous partners for Amber One
Amber Mobility’s partners read like the who-is-who of the industry. With regards to mapping data the company chose to work with TomTom. Latter provides HD-mapping material for the autonomous vehicles. Image processing of sensors will be developed with no-one less than Nvidia. Amber Mobility is also working with Microsoft in terms of AI software and is using its cloud service Azure.
Other cooperation partners are the TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research) and in fact Google subsidiary Waymo. Both Waymo and US car manufacturer General Motors announce large-scale tests.
About the author:
David Fluhr is journalist and owner of the digital magazine “Autonomes Fahren & Co”. He is reporting regularly about trends and technologies in the fields Autonomous Driving, HMI, Telematics and Robotics. Link to his site: http://www.autonomes-fahren.de