Daimler And Bosch Bringing Autonomous Shuttles To California

Daimler and Bosch have announced, in a joint statement, that they will launch a self-driving shuttle service in California next year.

The program will initially run as a test pilot of vehicles designed for city driving. Neither Daimler or Bosch said exactly where the pilot will take place, but confirmed that it will be somewhere in Silicon Valley.

The two companies formed a self-driving alliance in April 2017 and are developing the technology in Stuttgart and Silicon Valley. No details have been offered about the size of the program, nor how many vehicles it will involve or how many customers it will serve.

The program will use an app where users can request a free ride on selected routes in a self-driving prototype. A safety driver will be behind the wheel at all times.

Daimler says the pilot will help provide information about how self-driving vehicles operate in a complex transport network, Reuters reports.

The German automaker will use Mercedes-Benz S-Class and B-Class models to develop the cars set to be used in the pilot program.

In addition to announcing their autonomous pilot program, Daimler and Bosch have signed an agreement with Nvidia for the computing company to supply its artificial intelligence platform, dubbed Drive Pegasus.

As Nvidia’s ECU network gathers hundreds of gigabytes of data every mile, Bosch and Daimler have developed an efficient concept based on liquid cooling. Under the solution, the ECU network will be integrated into the cooling circuit used for the battery cells.