The world's first self-driving motorcycle

  • 17/06/2018

While many are still getting their heads around the concept of self-driving cars, an engineer has built the first self-driving motorcycle.

British broadcaster Sky News spoke to inventor Torquil Ross-Martin and experienced the bike in action on an airfield near Chippenham.

According to Ross-Martin, such vehicles could one day become safer than those driven by people, whose minds might be on matters other than the road ahead.

For now, the prototype serves another purpose - it is being used to teach driverless cars about the behaviour of bikes.

"A computer can do a better job than a human can, because it's always concentrating," said Mr Ross-Martin.

"So for commuting actually the problem is that you are not necessarily completely focused on what you are doing, you are thinking about what you are going to do when you get to the office or whether you are running late or, you know, all these kinds of things. So that's the sort of area in which it will improve the safety for commuters."

"Motorbikes are really agile really fast quite often faster than cars and they can suddenly weave in and out of traffic or accelerate really hard," added Richard Simpson, AB Dynamics engineer.

"And that's why we need to test it with a motorbike that can get up to those kind of speeds and acceleration."

CBS / Newshub.