Schiphol conducts trial with self-driving buses on airside (opens in new tab)

From one comment. Not comments. The rest of the pessimistic comments, like yours, are from a position lacking any experience of this vehicle.

They're made of meat?

Availability outside hours where it's not currently feasible to have a driver.

Immunity to strikes, illness, and all those pesky complexities with meat and flesh

Yes they are among the fastest buses I've ever been on. They drive like they are on a race track.

> Lets not kid ourselves. The only real "advantage" would have been one less driver earning a paycheck.

Given that all modern, developed countries have to fight with a population decrease, this is actually a good thing. We have to prepare for a future where there will be barely anyone left to do relatively low-skill jobs, and the earlier we begin to automate them, the better - otherwise, we'll be in quite the bind in a decade or two, once the last boomers that work high into their 80s just to survive are finally dead.

Self-driving in ports is a vastly simpler problem though because the environment can be closed and controlled and devoid of any UX concerns, making it basically a simple robotics problem.

Yes there doesn’t seem to be anything interesting here. They obviously aren’t developing anything remotely like the Waymo/Cruise tech, and no reason to think they’ve developed anything useful even within some highly constrained setting. I’d guess it’s a corporate feel-good project that will be wound down after the press release.

What makes that possible? Closed course, has to stay on tracks?

It's literally Amsterdam Airport? I don't think it needs clarification. It's like saying "JFK/Heathrow/LAX conducts trial with self-driving buses on airside"

Schipol is quite a famous airport, though.

I'm with you! I thought it was a town for most of the release. I didn't know what "airside" meant either, pardon my ignorance. I've never encountered that word in American English.

> many won't know if this is a company, a town, or what until paragraph 4 of the press release?

The word "airside" in the title already gives a pretty enormous clue !

It's a pretty big global airport, isn't it? Maybe for freight more than passangers, but I definitely know the name and I've never been to the Netherlands.

A quick look on wikipedia says it has about the same passenger and freight numbers as JFK, though I guess that's more well known because of all the sitcoms set in New York.

Seconded

Tom Scott video (because of course he did one):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3OqAN4ISOw

Yep, Dulles opened just as jet bridges became common. They were originally used for embarkation/disembarkation as well.

These days, they're mostly used to transport international arrivals from the gates (which have jet bridges) to the terminal that contains immigration control. Non-international have an option to use the lounges or a subway (usually depending on which gate you're at and where you need to go - sometime the lounge is faster than the train).

A bit of an anachronism today. But, having grown up in the DC area, they're definitely have a nostalgia factor.

These things have a high 'what might have been' future factor, but man they are annoying in practice. Because you have to wait for everyone to cram inside, it feels much slower than a train or moving walkway. They're very frustrating after a long flight when you just want to get to customs and get home.

Whenever I travel in a group through Shiphol, at least one piece of luggage gets missing every time. Yes, they manage to get it back to you eventually (although I did lose an expensive pair of running shoes there), but the amount of hoops you have to jump through at times is complete madness. After ten years of going over Shiphol 1-2 per year, I'm now at a point where I just try to find a route around it.

Weird, Schiphol is my least favorite major airport. Poor dining options, for one, but the worst is how narrow the pathways are. If you're trying to pass a gate that's within twenty minutes of the boarding time, you've got to push through a crowd. (And I can't blame the crowd, as there's not nearly enough seating.)

This is when flying Air France/KLM within Europe. Maybe it's better in other terminals.

It's one of my least favorite airports in Europe. The number of times my luggage got lost there alone is enough for me to avoid whenever possible. The shops and restaurants are also extremely bland.

I've several times made it from a hotel room in town to my gate at Schiphol in under an hour. Without trying, and walking/taking the train from central.

Schiphol AMS is my favorite European airport.

It’s not as great as SIN, ICN or the once dominant HKG though.

I hate Schiphol, and my family tend to call it by a name that rhymes.

Next step: Going down from your plane, your Apple Video Bus strolls around the tarmac, passes through a giant Xray scanner, checks your passport (embedded on your seat), suggests a thousand duty-free products and makes you wear a luxury watch for about 8 seconds just for marketing, rolls straight onto the highway and drops you off at the hotel. No airport facilities.