Taken from EasyMile’s demo video

Self-driving cars are still outside the reach of ordinary people, but self-driving buses are out prowling the streets of some of the world’s major cities, such as, uh, Helsinki. But holy ghost of Henry Ford are these things slow.


These little buses are made by a French company called EasyMile, using GPS and a kind of computer vision to putt-putt along without a driver.

But these things top out at a bristling 10 kilometers per hour. That’s 6.2 mph. In EasyMile’s demonstration video, you can see these buses regularly outpaced by people on foot:


I’m happy this tech is getting out into the real world, getting extremely valuable data, but I can’t help but laugh at how almost worthlessly slow these pods are. Their speedy development can’t come soon enough.