If you’ve ever had the near-death experience of riding in a New York City taxi, and I have, you’ve probably thought to yourself, ‘It be better if a robot was driving this thing.’ Well, someone seems to have heard our pleas (or at least mine) and they are working on developing robot taxis.

Naturally, this is just in concept form at the moment, and just as naturally, it’s coming from Europe. Specifically, it’s coming from a Czech firm by the name of Kubik Design. Kubik Design’s Robot Taxis look a lot like modernized version of those transportation pods you see in Sci-fi movies like Logan’s Run. You know, more like an appliance than a conveyance.

Kubik Design foresees a networked systems of these robot taxis, electrically powered and very low cost to both operate and use. All of them would be synchronized through any city, and aware of each other. You could jump in one of them at any point and reach any destination, door to door, in next to no time. It would be one ever evolving, always self-adjusting, fully optimized, and redundant public traffic system … no, wait, that was the giant Krell machine from Forbidden Planet, we shouldn’t do that.

But seriously, apart from the liability issues, is there a reason why some of these couldn’t be test deployed in a major urban center as a test?

Source: Gizmodo