Volkswagen’s autonomous ridesharing subsidiary MOIA is committing to delivering driverless rides to the city of Hamburg by 2025, and the company’s CEO explains the background on Thursday’s Highways Voices podcast from the ITS World Congress sponsored by SWARCO and GEWI.

“The goal really is by 2024-25 we’ll have a commercial ride pooling service without safety drivers fully autonomous available here in Hamburg,” Robert Henrich told host Paul Hutton. “These vehicles now exist, you can see them you can touch them… and we now start mapping and start doing the test drives. It’s now finally happening.”

Other technical advancements in Hamburg are explained by Martin Huber, who is Director General of Hamburg’s Ministry of Transport and Mobility Transition who joins Paul again to discuss existing technology on the streets of the city including “Red lights that given invisible signal, which is exactly the same as the light on the micro second” that interface with connected and autonomous vehicles.

Ronny Dittrich from GEWI has perfected a way of managing roadworks in real time to improve the environment and road safety explaining, “TIC for work zones is a system where everyone working with work zones in a company, and maybe also other companies can put their work zones into a single system… where conflicts can be detected,” while we also hear about a connected safety solution for cyclists and pedestrians, the reaction of two Clearview Intelligence experts checking out the Congress as visitors and, of course, Eric Sampson’s guide to Thursday at the Congress and the latest news from Highways News HQ with Adrian Tatum. Listen here.

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