Next month Cambridge will begin trialing three autonomous, electric buses known as Auto-Shuttles. Created by British self-driving vehicle manufacturer Aurrigo, the Shuttles look like they were designed as CAD tutorials, where you start with a rectangle and use every tool in the palette to warp, facet and extrude various surfaces.
Seen in the Union Jack livery chosen for the Cambridge trials, the vehicles are even more attention-getting:
The buses are actually quite small, which can be difficult to tell by the photos; each can carry just 10 passengers. However, it appears that the plan is to run them constantly. "These shuttles can be used on demand all day and night, every day of the year - which is unaffordable with our existing public transport," Claire Ruskin, director of Cambridge Network, told the BBC. "They are flexible and make good use of resources without needing much infrastructure."
Here's what they look like in motion:
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I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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These Autonomous Electric Buses Look Like They Were Designed as a CAD Tutorial
Looks like a fairly conventional small bus under the slice-and-dice pedestrian impact features ...
yikes!
Somebody wished they were a concept designer for Deus Ex...