On 20 September, as part of the European Mobility Week, Madrid hosted the first on-road demonstration of the prototype autonomous electric microbus of the CITIES Timanfaya project.

CITIES Timanfaya, led by Madrid’s Universidad Carlos III and the Spanish Road Association (Asociación Española de la Carretera), aims to bring in autonomous, electric and multimedia buses to complete Lanzarote’s tourist route around the Montañas del Fuego volcanic landscape in the National Park of Timanfaya.

This trailblazing R&D project is backed and driven by a consortium of ten Spanish organizations of acknowledged renown in the intelligent transportation sector. GMV’s particular role within this consortium is to provide the communication system, which will keep a track of the GNSS position at all times and pass on information from the various autonomous-vehicle subsystems to a control center that will run the whole monitoring system, also supported by GMV’s inhouse solutions.

Under this project the first autonomous electric microbus has now been developed to replace the internal-combustion vehicles currently running on this historical route. This is the first level-5 autonomy vehicle, thanks to the development of various intelligent onboard systems.

The vehicle came through its first test with flying colors. With institutional and media representatives traveling onboard, the vehicle carried out a circular, 400-meter run at an average speed of 8 kph, in totally autonomous mode. The aim is for the vehicle to be running on Lanzarote by spring 2020, once the project team has managed to type-approve the autonomous vehicles.

The groundbreaking CITIES Timanfaya project has recently been nominated as a finalist in the 7th Enertic Award scheme, making the island of Lanzarote a worldwide beacon in top-quality tourism, operating at the cutting edge of technology and offering a unique tourism experience. The project has other knock-on advantages. Subsequent applications will benefit Lanzarote’s residents and its industrial and business sector (bus fleets and hire vehicles, vehicle components, telephony, technological suppliers, power companies, financial services, transport services, healthcare, etc.