The small autonomous electric bus created by Finnish company Sensible 4 and Japanese firm Muji is already taking its first steps. It carries up to sixteen people and can operate in all weather conditions.
Mobility on demand. Electric and autonomous. This is the vision of startup Sensible 4, which in little more than a year managed to build the first prototype and present it to the press last Friday. Born from the collaboration between the Helsinki-based company and Japanese firm Muji, Gacha can carry up to sixteen people and operate in any weather conditions, whether fair weather, ice or snow.
"The development of Gacha began when the Sensible 4 team, which was then working with the first generation of autonomous buses, realised that these didn't even work in light rain," said Harri Santamala, president of Sensible 4. "Not to mention the typical winter conditions in Finland. Autonomous driving technology is not yet ready. Today most autonomous vehicles can only operate in ideal weather conditions and on well-marked roads." Santamala's team, on the other hand, managed to complete several tests in the winter conditions of Finnish Lapland.
The first road tests will be carried out on the streets of Espoo and Helsinki from April of this year, to assess the vehicle's performance and its interaction with city traffic. The entire software platform, obstacle detection system and both internal and external structure were created entirely by Sensible 4 in record time.
The idea behind Gacha is that of the so-called last mile — that final stretch of a journey taking us from home to work, to school, into the city. An integrated mobility model, then, in which there is ever less room for the private car and where public and shared transport communicate via the internet and move hundreds of people from one part of the city to another.
But the vehicle has been designed above all for areas and people with reduced mobility. "In a society like Japan's and Finland's, where the population is ageing rapidly, we would need mobility services designed for people with reduced mobility, or who live in hard-to-reach, isolated places," Muji explains. All it will take is an app to book Gacha, and the nearest vehicle will come directly to the user's door.
The two companies expect the bus to be ready for industrialisation by 2020, with the aim of having a first operational fleet by 2021. The project, however, is part of a broader sustainable and smart mobility initiative for the Finnish capital. "Today Helsinki is home to the world's first software service for sharing mobility information," explains Helsinki Business Hub, the agency that works to promote collaboration and investment between local and international organisations. It is an open system that allows everyone to access freely the information relating to public transport companies, routes, timetables and ticket purchases.
"For example," they explain, "Helsinki's public transport company (Hsl) has made available via app all the data on routes, vehicle locations, timetables, and much more." A kind of platform where users can freely choose the means of transport that best suits their needs and the destination they need to reach. Today the capital's public transport service ranks second in the European quality-of-service rankings.