High-Speed Autonomous Trains Will Carry Passengers By 2023, Testing Will Start In 2019

We’ve seen companies looking into high-speed trains transportation that will take people from New York City to Washington, D.C., faster, but France is taking it up a step : driverless high-speed trains.

France’s railway system, SNCF, said it's working on a TGVs (high-speed trains) that are autonomous, according to FranceInfo. TGVs currently travel at about 200 miles per hour and travel to over 230 cities across France. The TGVs can also transport people to other countries, like Belgium, Spain and Italy.

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SNCF is reportedly working on a “drone train” project, which will be equipped with autonomous technology. The system will include external sensors that will anticipate obstacles on the track and automatically brake, if necessary. The TGVs won’t be completely driverless, since they will be operated from a distance. The driver’s job will be mostly to manage the closing of doors and to take action in case of emergency situations.

SNCF is expected to test its prototype in 2019 and will transport goods on track yards. The TGV version which will carry passengers is expected to run in 2023 between Paris and southeast France. The autonomous TGV would be the first of its kind worldwide, Matthieu Chabanel, Deputy Managing Director at SNCF Réseau, told FranceInfo.

"On high-speed, we are aiming for automation in the sense of automatic steering as in aircraft. In aircraft, you always have a driver, fortunately, but you have an automatic steering system," Chabanel said.

Some railway group leaders are concerned jobs will be lost because of the driverless trains, but SNCF said human presence will still be necessary. Chabanel added that trains travel “in a completely open environment with trees, animals, people, who can enter the right-of-way,” and because of that they will “need a driver to handle all the disturbed situations."

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The autonomous TGVs could improve the regularity and speed of trains, especially in the Paris region, where multiple lines intersect, and where the smallest incident on a track can lead to many consequences. SNCF said the time between trains will go from 180 seconds down to 108 seconds with the new TGVs. The number of trains traveling on a line will increase by 25 percent, since the autonomous trains will boost the system through sequences of braking and acceleration, Alain Krakovitch, the director of SNCF Transilien, told FranceInfo.

While France focuses on autonomous high-speed trains, Los Angeles-based company Hyperloop One revealed in March its first images of its test tube, the DevLoop, located in the Nevada desert just 30 minutes away from Las Vegas, The company said it was preparing for the installation of a commercial tube that will connect Dubai and Abu Dhabi, about a 100-mile stretch, in just 12 minutes. Trips with the tube between major cities in the Gulf region could take less than an hour, the company said.

Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk launched his tunnel boring company this year. Musk plans to create a vast underground network of tunnels in California that includes 30 levels of tunnels for cars and high-speed trains, like the Hyperloop.