Skip to main content

Australia launches self-driving vehicle pilot

The Victorian Government in Australia has partnered with Bosch, the Transport Accident Commission and VicRoads to build the first vehicle developed in Australia with self-driving capabilities. The US$900,000 (AU$1.2 million) investment has helped Bosch develop the self-driving vehicle, which has been designed to navigate roads with or without driver input and includes technology such as inbuilt sensors and cameras to detect and avoid hazards such as pedestrians, cyclists and other vehicles. Trials of
October 6, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
The Victorian Government in Australia has partnered with Bosch, the Transport Accident Commission and 4728 VicRoads to build the first vehicle developed in Australia with self-driving capabilities.

The US$900,000 (AU$1.2 million) investment has helped Bosch develop the self-driving vehicle, which has been designed to navigate roads with or without driver input and includes technology such as inbuilt sensors and cameras to detect and avoid hazards such as pedestrians, cyclists and other vehicles.

Trials of the vehicle will be used to inform the development of regulations and infrastructure to enable similar self-driving cars to operate on Victorian roads when they become commercially available in the future.

The trial will also help VicRoads better understand how motorists use self-driving vehicles and the changes needed to prepare for the future.

Traffic management experts and urban planners will get a better understanding of the need to reconfigure road networks and traffic signals to optimise safety and the flow of vehicles across the network.

The government believe self-driving vehicles are an important step to reducing road trauma with 90 per cent of crashes resulting from human error. It says the introduction of highly-automated vehicles has the potential to help Victoria achieve its Towards Zero vision – a future free of deaths and serious injuries on the state’s roads.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Necessity is the mother of invention
    April 6, 2016
    The Netherlands aims to lead Europe, and the world, in the area of cooperative ITS and smart mobility. That’s not an aspiration – it’s a necessity as Frans op de Beek, principal advisor for traffic management and ITS within the Rijkswaterstaat, the Ministry for Infrastructure and the Environment, explains.
  • Smartphone solution for parking performance
    March 31, 2017
    Automated parking offers optimised space utilisation and fewer damage complaints as David Crawford discovers. As cars become smarter, technology designed to make parking them more straightforward is developing in parallel. In turn, it is becoming clear that the places where vehicles spend much of their time will need to respond – more comprehensively than by supporting established aids such as smartphone-based parking location and reservation, or payment for time used.
  • Smartphone solution for parking performance
    March 31, 2017
    Automated parking offers optimised space utilisation and fewer damage complaints as David Crawford discovers. As cars become smarter, technology designed to make parking them more straightforward is developing in parallel. In turn, it is becoming clear that the places where vehicles spend much of their time will need to respond – more comprehensively than by supporting established aids such as smartphone-based parking location and reservation, or payment for time used.
  • We need to talk about AVs
    October 15, 2021
    Will driverless vehicles lead to more deaths and destroy more lives than their manual counterparts? Transport writer Colin Sowman argues that they will