X

Self-driving buses roll onto Helsinki's roads

A test in the Finnish city has self-driving buses navigating actual traffic.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
Credentials
  • Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.
See full bio
Edward Moyer

Roll up for the driverless mystery tour.

 Vantaa-kanava fi; YouTube screenshot by CNET

Now this is what we'd call a magic bus.

The city of Helsinki, in Finland, is currently testing a pair of self-driving buses "in the wild," if you will -- that is, on active city streets.

"This is actually a really big deal right now," the project's leader, Harri Santamala, told Finnish news outlet Uutiset. "There's no more than a handful of these kinds of street traffic trials taking place, if that."

The tests are among the first in the world, according to Uutiset, because Finnish law doesn't mandate that a vehicle on the streets have a driver.

The buses, which will be on the road till mid-September, could one day supplement existing public transit by shuttling riders to major lines.

They're not exactly speed demons though. The electric EZ10 bus that's being used in the test can transport up to nine people and moves at about 6 miles per hour.

The neighboring city of Vantaa used the buses during a housing fair last year, but they were kept separate from regular traffic. Similar buses are also being used in a park near Tokyo. And various other projects involve the vehicles negotiating nature parks and university campuses. A test in the Netherlands last month saw a different, Mercedes-made self-driving bus interacting with actual traffic in some instances.

The EZ10 is a cute little fella. Santamala retweeted a picture sent out by the manufacturer, France-based EasyMile:

And this YouTube video of the Vantaa project lets you ride along with some fun-loving Finns: