Sacramento mulling driverless car program

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A driverless car program could be headed to the city of Sacramento, California.

According to CBS Sacramento, Sacramento’s Chief Innovation Officer Louis Stewart is “paving the way” for Phantom Auto—which offers a “teleoperation-as-a-service safety solution” for all autonomous vehicles—to launch a test program on city streets by June.

For Stewart, Sacramento is the perfect location for a program like this.

“Sacramento is the locus of power,” Stewart says. “We have all the politicians here, we have all the regulatory bodies here, and we have a citizenry that’s actually hungry for this kind of technology.”

During the program, a 5G Verizon internet connection will reportedly be used to operate the car. The car, however, will not be fully autonomous.

“There’s gonna be a safety operator in the vehicle,” says Shai Magzimof, Phantom Auto’s founder. “We don’t have empty vehicles yet and then we map the network and we know where are the good areas for autonomy’s vehicles to operate that we can help in case there was a problem.”

The program will reportedly cost approximately $500,000, but the city and other stakeholders would only pay about 20% of that total.

With the possibility of an NBA All-Star Game taking place in Sacramento in 2022 or 2023, the goal is to have the cars ready by then. The Sacramento Kings’ bid to host the game includes using driverless cars to get people to and from the Golden 1 Center, which is where the All-Star Game would be held.