Self-driving buses being tested across Japan enable you to pay together with your face

Being cautious is certainly wise, but we really seem to be dragging our collective heels when it comes to self-driving vehicles. Considering in Japan reports of cars barreling straight into storefronts seem to happen frequently, it’s hard to assume a good flawed autonomous driving system doing much worse that humanity all together has been.

But steps are being made, and a fascinating development has emerge from Maebashi City in Gunma Prefecture. More sparsely populated mid-sized cities like this rely a lot more on vehicular transport, so that it is a great testing grounds for a fresh self-driving bus developed by a council of public transport companies, along with telecom giant NTT Docomo and Gunma University.

Like any autonomous vehicle, the buses are kitted out with sensors to monitor surrounding traffic and signage and EW also synced with traffic information and geographic information systems through a 5G connection. Testing on a route with Maebashi Station and Chuo Maebashi Station is expected to begin this December.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry is holding a cross-country testing tour of self-driving buses, along with various regional bus companies. The Hyogo Prefecture leg has just wrapped up in Mita City, in which a six-kilometer route have been run completely with out a human driver for approximately a month between late July and late August.

Well, it had been almost completely with out a human. A software glitch required a human to take over for about four days of the trial run. Nevertheless, of the 1,306 passengers who rode the route, half said it was equally as good as a human-driven bus when it found accelerating and turning smoothly, and a further third said it had been even better.

However, when it found stopping, over half of the passengers described it as “bad” and only 25 % called it as effective as a human. So while performance was a mixed bag, most walked away impressed overall.

But perhaps the most appealing feature on both Maebashi and Mita buses is their “face pass” (kao pass) system where passengers have their face scanned and registered beforehand so that their account gets charged automatically once their face is detected boarding a bus.

This may make the technology easier to use for seniors who aren’t comfortable with other types of electronic payment, since they wouldn’t have to lift a finger. For ordinary people, this also means a finish to standing in line to log off the bus while someone fumbles around for actual change.

Although COVID-19 has resulted in small changes in scheduling, these test runs remain pushing ahead and the response has been big, with 90 percent of riders on the Kobe test simply there to check on it out rather than actually getting from point A to point B. This would suggest that the truth of self-driving buses are probably not too much away.