The Eindhoven company Amber is testing the platooning technique with which autonomous cars automatically drive behind a car driven by a driver. With this, the car-sharing company hopes to eventually be able to move several cars with one person.
The test took place on a closed bus lane at the Flight Forum in Eindhoven. Three cars drove there at night, one with a driver, the other two followed automatically. Amber uses modified BMW i3s for this. Co-founder Steven Nelemans calls the test, a collaboration between the municipality of Eindhoven and mobility program SmartwayZ.NL, a success.
For the test, Amber largely made use of the sensors and technology that are already in the car, says Joep Sloot, operational director at Amber. “Most of it is based on the camera of the car itself. With this test, we just wanted to see what we can get out of the car’s technology and what we need to add later to make it reliable and safe. For this test, we have we only added computers to process the information. In certain light and road conditions the camera doesn’t work so well, so we could add radar, for example.”
Sloot says that Amber will carry out more tests on roads to be closed such as bus lanes. “Now we are going to add a lot of sensors and see what we really need. Ultimately, we hope to arrive at a package that also remains within limits in terms of costs. It is not our goal to develop the technology ourselves, but precisely that. to use what is already there. For this we work together with Vention, a technology company on the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven.”
The company expects the technology to be ready by the end of this year. “And then we have to wait for the legislator, because platooning is not yet allowed,” the company writes. Ultimately, the car-sharing company wants to use the bus lanes at night to redistribute cars. Amber also calls this the first step towards autonomous driving of their shared cars.
Amber has a car sharing platform for the business market. Users can reserve a car via an app. Cars are regularly moved between central points to ensure a car is available at the right time. At the moment this still happens with fleet operators; with the platooning technique, several cars could be moved with a single driver.
Platooning is also known from the truck world, because of, among other things, CO2 emissions. Rijkswaterstaat says that the electronic coupling of the trucks ensures that there is a more constant driving speed and therefore fewer emissions. Nevertheless, according to De Ingenieur, Daimler recently stopped testing truck platooning, because the emission reduction of less than one percent was not as great as expected.