For a long time, there was no news from the company NEVS, there was not even a post on their accounts on social networks. Last year for NEVS was marked by the sale of assets and previous acquisitions such as Protean, all due to financial problems of the parent Chinese giant Evergrande Group (as the majority owner of NEVS).
After a long lull, today the NEVS company announced the news that it has concluded a strategic partnership agreement with the UK’s company Oxbotica, which specializes in creating autonomous software that enables any vehicle in any industry to drive itself. In essence, Oxbotica offers complete solutions for business users regarding the creation of autonomous transport systems.
Just one example of Oxbotica’s solution is the joint development of a Level 4 self-driving system with another auto industry giant, ZF, with which they have developed a 24/7 passenger shuttle scheduling system on fixed routes in major cities around the world. The company NEVS and Oxbotica will look for a similar solution to develop a fleet of self-driving, all-electric vehicles to be deployed on public roads by the end of 2023, revolutionising urban mobility and enabling communities to reduce carbon emissions.
Of course, the basic platform for this system will be NEVS’s SANGO vehicles, to which Oxbotica will donate software – Oxbotica’s driver autonomy system will be integrated into the NEVS ‘Sango’ vehicle. According to this plan, the NEVS ‘Sango’ vehicles driven by Oxbotica will provide an autonomous, safe, and sustainable alternative to private cars, reducing emissions and congestion.
To remind you, the NEVS development team introduced a similar system last year – NEVS fleet management system that gives operational support for traffic management, on-site fleet assistance, and vehicle management to guarantee a reliable product experience and scalable and efficient operations. This system is very similar to this target, except that the one Oxbotica is more sophisticated and probably more tested in practice, so this strategic partnership will enable the direct integration of the “driver autonomy system” directly into the Sango fleet. Oxbotica Driver is a low-energy-use, high-performance suite of technologies that works safely and seamlessly with any sensor, vehicle, or platform.
The plans are big for now and they indicate that an initial fleet will be deployed on geo-fenced public roads next year, followed by multiple projects in Europe in 2024. From 2025 onwards, the solution will be scaled across the globe, as part of the NEVS mobility ecosystem, which comprises the ‘Sango’ vehicle, a fleet management system and an app as the user interface.
From this point of view, all these announcements and plans seem very optimistic, so they remain to be proven in practice. What we see as a potential problem in public transport and its automation is capacity – Sango autonomous vehicles in practice have a very small capacity – only 6 seats for passengers.
