Driverless cabs putting themselves on the map

These days, with a few taps on a smartphone app you can book a cab, and within minutes a cab driver will pick you up and drop you at whichever destination you have chosen.

Soon, thanks to technological advances, the cab will arrive to pick you up once booked but there will be no driver at the wheel. On July 7, the Beijing high-level automatic driving exemplary office announced it was allowing enterprises to provide paid travel in automatically-driven cars to residents of the municipality. This comes more than two years after a pioneering zone was demarcated in the municipality and three months after the first group of driverless cabs were seen in Yizhuang economic development zone. From every aspect, it is fair to say the decision was taken after giving much thought to passenger safety.

After all any accident would immediately cast doubts on the safety of this new technology, which would be a setback to its implementation. It was therefore a wise move to test the new technology over a period of time to remove all possible doubts before implementing it.

Once driverless cabs become a reality, the benefits will exceed expectations. Imagine booking a cab during rush hour in Beijing. One has to wait endlessly sometimes, as there are just around 66,000 taxis and 12,000 app-cabs serving the city's 22 million residents.

Once the automatic taxis are pressed into service, it will make the system more smooth.

However, that will take some time, as initially, only 116 driverless taxis are hitting the road in a 60-square-km area in Yizhuang, with one driver remotely controlling each cab. That's just the start of the process of automatic driving, which is going to be the future.