If someone applies for a smartphone application, unmanned taxis will come and take you to your destination soon.

According to the Trends Report, a market research company on February 12, the world autonomous driving taxi market is expected to continue its high annual growth rate of 81% from this year to 2023. Until 2020, it will be a test driving period of 1 ~ 20,000 vehicles, and it is expected that self-driving taxi will increase to 150,000 units in 2013 and 190,000 units in 2023 in earnest commercialization in 2021.

Evelyn TrendForce analysts predict that by 2020, `level 4` autonomous vehicles will officially start commercial sales and then evolve to level 5, which is fully autonomous. The level 4 autonomous driving prescribed by the American Society of Automotive Engineers is capable of driving without any driver intervention under certain circumstances.

Trends stated that Uber, the world`s largest car caller, worked with Volvo, Ford and the Daimler group to commercialize an autonomous taxi by 2021 and demonstrated autonomous driving at the CES 2018 event in Las Vegas earlier this year The lift also plans to start an autonomous taxi service at the same time with General Motors (GM) and Alpha`s autonomous drive division, Wei Mo.

A Chinese vehicle-sharing service company in Asia, Didi Chuxing, opened its autonomous driving research and development center in California last year, while Grab, also called Uber between Southeast Asia, is also testing in Singapore for commercial services in 2021 . Grap has decided to invest tens of billions of won in strategic investments earlier this year, and Samsung Electronics has also signed a strategic alliance.

In Korea, services such as an autonomous mini-shuttle bus will be commercialized after 2020. The government recently announced plans to operate a mini-shuttle bus in Sejong City (Smart City) in 2020 and a self-driving bus in the metropolitan area and highway in 2021. Also, it plans to introduce a regulated sandbox to find new service models such as autonomous taxis. Regulatory sandbox is a system that allows users to launch services or products in the market regardless of existing regulations.

In the case of private sector, Hyundai Motor, in cooperation with Aurora, a US auto manufacturer, announced in 2021 that it would develop the industry`s best autonomous driving technology.

An industry expert stated, "Although there is no direct comment on autonomous taxi in Korea due to the opposition from the existing industry, the situation will change after three years once the era of full-scale autonomous navigation is opened and the sky.”


By Park Jung Il comja77@


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