Unless it stops being such a homogenous culture, Japan, with its graying population, will need someone–or something–to do the work, including ferrying older folks to the grocery store. One benefit among the many downsides to hosting the Olympics is the development of infrastructure, and in the case of Tokyo 2020, the nation is aiming to retrofit a fleet of thousands of taxis with driverless capacity to handle the overflow of visitors. It would be quite a scene, and the nation sees it as a chance to announce a renewed technological prowess on a world stage. 

I’ve blogged before about Robot Taxi conducting a very small-scale experiment with autonomous cabs in 2016, and the development will have to be accelerated greatly after that if the unmovable deadline is to be met. From Dan Frommer at Quartz:

Japan is planning to use the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as an opportunity to show the world it’s still a tech leader. One of those efforts—if the technology and regulatory clearances shape out—could be an autonomous, self-driving taxi service, currently in development.

Tokyo-based Robot Taxi (link in Japanese) is still on track to start field tests of its driverless taxi service in one region of Japan by the end of next March, its chief executive Hiroshi Nakajima told Quartz today (Nov. 2). The company, a joint venture between DeNA (one of Japan’s mobile internet pioneers) and ZMP (a robotics firm; tagline “Robot of Everything”) is not building its own cars from scratch. Instead, it’s focusing on adding driverless capabilities to existing cars and designing, creating, and marketing the taxi service. 

One key market for the service, Nakajima says, is Japan’s increasingly elderly population, especially in rural areas where there may be driver shortages.•