PSA takes on Uber with robo-cabs

French carmaker PSA has announced a partnership with American start-up NuTonomy in a bid to develop entirely autonomous vehicles for ride-hailing, reports Le Figaro. By 2020, it wants to have thousands of robo-cabs buzzing around in large European and North-American cities under its proprietary Free2Move brand.

NuTomony is a spin off from the prestigious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). It will be testing two specially adapted Peugeot 3008s in Singapore, where it has an office and is involved in local Uber competitor Grab. The cars will be tested on public roads as from September. It is the start-up’s goal to have the first robo-taxis commercially operational in the Asian city-state by 2018.

“We’re confident that working with Groupe PSA will bring us closer to our goal of deploying a safe, efficient, fully autonomous mobility-on-demand transportation service for urban driving environments,” NuTonomy CEO and co-founder Karl lagnemma said in a statement. “This collaboration is a significant step towards fully autonomous vehicles, which will enable us to offer different mobility solutions to our customers,” declared PSA business lab official Anne Laliron.

Picutre copyright: PSA/NuTonomy, 2017