The United Arab Emirates has issued a dramatic goal for driverless cars, mandating that by 2030, 25 percent of all travel within the city of Dubai should be done by autonomous vehicles.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum made the announcement on Monday, and suggested that the mandate would reduce injury and deaths from traffic accidents as well as save money. The program will be overseen by the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority and the Dubai Future Foundation, but it has not yet been stated how the project will be funded.
The UAE already has a high-tech reputation: the 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa located in Dubai is the world’s tallest building, and 178 million riders took Dubai’s driverless railway system in 2015. The Roads and Transport Authority director-general Mattar al-Tayer said that the driverless vehicles will be produced in a partnership with EasyMile, a France-based autonomous car maker that produces the 10-person EZ10 vehicle. However, there haven’t been any formal agreements made in terms of how much this will cost, and the Roads and Transport Authority’s licensing agency is looking at options including private cars, taxis, and cable cars.
The companies will also have to be sure their cars can handle Dubai’s weather, which can reach past 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. The city also presents a challenge with its seasonal fog.
Al-Tayer said that there will be live test-runs held using vehicles from a variety of manufacturers before the program takes off.
With companies like Google, Tesla, and General Motors working on self-driving technology, 2030 seems like a reasonable goal, or at least one that will bring some kind of change to the automotive world. According to Phys.org, Google has been approached by Dubai, but Google itself would not specify which countries it had been in contact with, only that groups from around the world were interested in their technology.