The autonomous or self-driving vehicle market has witnessed a massive development in recent years. It is the result of the advancement in technology that lets a vehicle move anywhere without human assistance. The autonomous vehicle market is estimated to progress to a great extent in the near future in Europe.
Even the governments of various countries across the world are welcoming the autonomous vehicles as these are touted to bring much-improved road safety, improved public transport services, and efficient services. But there are some challenges that have to be overcome to adopt to the autonomous vehicle trend and these include cybersecurity risks, privacy, and others.
Already, the prominent players in this sector are conducting tests to make sure the self-driving vehicles can be adopted widely. Besides this, there is a slew of innovative startups in Europe that have taken part in this industry. Here we have listed some of the self-driving vehicles that are already plying on the European roads.
Xomnia (Nerherlands)
Founders: Ollie Dapper, William van Lith
Founded year: 2013
Why its hot: Big Data company Xomnia has built the first self-driving boat that works entirely on artificial intelligence with a minimal budget and five cameras. According to the company, the images that enter the computer are directly passed into the deep learning network that acts like a brain. The boat sails independently based on the collected data and gained experience.
NAVYA (France)
Founder: Christophe Sapet
Funding: €64.1 million
Founded year: 2014
Why its hot: NAVYA is a leading French company in the industry of autonomous driving systems. This French company designs, manufactures, and commercialises autonomous, electric, and driverless vehicles that combine digital, robotic, and driving technologies. NAVYA has a couple of autonomous vehicles in its portfolio – AUTONOM SHUTTLE and AUTONOM CAB.
Amber (Netherlands)
Founders: Steven Nelemans, Merien ten Houten, Joep Sloot, Hans de Penning
Funding: €500k
Founded year: 2016
Why its hot: Amber is a flexible car sharing platform ensuring you on-demand mobility. The Eindhoven-based self-driving car startup is an intelligence platform that offers you a customisable, and a modular electric car designed to be shared. Amber plans to have the self-driving cars on the road for testing purpose in Eindhoven around 2020, with the ambition of expanding the service to the rest of the Netherlands and Europe in the upcoming future.
Einride (Sweden)
Founders: Filip Lilja, Linnéa Kornehed, Robert Falck
Funding: €27.2 million
Funded year: 2016
Why its hot: Einride has developed fully electric and autonomous logging trucks. One of its offerings, the Einride Pod is all-electric and autonomous and is equipped with specialised modular trailers for pallets, timber, perishable goods, and others. The company’s electric self-driving cargo trucks that can be controlled remotely by drivers. Back in 2018, Einride joined with logistics company DB Schenker for the commercial installation of an all-electric, autonomous truck at the latter’s facility in Sweden.
FACC (Austria)
Founded year: 1989
Why its hot: Austria-based FACC entered into a strategic partnership with EHang, one of the world’s most promising autonomous air mobility companies based in China. In a joint effort, both the companies will optimize the autonomous air vehicles (AAV) sector and make them ready for series production. In addition, solutions for the individual air mobility of the future will be jointly developed, and research will be conducted on new technologies for AAV.
AIMotive (Hungary)
Founder: Laszlo Kishonti
Funding: €44 million
Founded year: 2015
Why its hot: AIMotive is a full-stack autonomous vehicle tech company that has developed its proprietary autonomous driving tech primarily depends on off-the-shelf camera sensors that are affordable and uses artificial intelligence-based vision processing. Its technology is highly scalable due to its flexibility and modularity. The AImotive’s software can be ported into several car models in diverse locations across the world.
Main image picture credits: NAVYA
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