The successful pilot of Northern Ireland’s first self-driving shuttle service ‘Harlander’ will come to a close as planned at the end of this week.
The pilot programme for the service, which has operated on a 15-20 minute loop through Titanic Quarter from Titanic Halt Railway station to Catalyst, was initially intended to run between July and September before being extended for an additional month to run to the end of October.
The 9-seater vehicle, which had a safety operator on board during the pilot phase, was designed to offer last mile connectivity from public transport networks to businesses, tourist attractions and education and leisure facilities.
Research carried out during the pilot found there was a 92% satisfaction rate amongst users. The service was most popular with passengers in the 40-59 age demographic, followed by those aged 25-39, with commuters making up 40% of the passengers, 40% being occasional users, 15% tourists and 5% students.
Belfast Harbour led the development of the Harlander service alongside a consortium of partners that includes eVersum, Oxa, Angoka, BT and HORIBA MIRA.
The consortium will now take learnings from the pilot programme and Belfast Harbour will revisit its autonomous vehicle programme in 2026.
Mike Dawson, People and Digital Transformation Director at Belfast Harbour, said: “The Harlander pilot was Northern Ireland’s first step towards having autonomous vehicles on publicly accessible roads and the project partners are all really proud of how it has been received, with incredibly high passenger satisfaction rates.
“The aim of the Harlander project was to increase understanding of how a modern transport option could complement the city’s existing public transport, such as buses, rail and better connect people to key destinations within Belfast Harbour Estate.
“The pilot programme was intended to run for a fixed period and was extended in order to get more feedback from passengers that will inform how we evaluate the project and feeding back to the UK Government to support their wider autonomy plans incoming regulation. This has been a hugely collaborative project and we should be proud that such innovative technology has been successfully deployed in Northern Ireland.”
The initiative received £11m joint government and industry funding, including £5.5m in funding through the Commercialising CAM programme, delivered by Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), in partnership with Innovate UK and Zenzic. The programme invested £41.5m in innovation projects across the UK to demonstrate real world benefits of connected and autonomous vehicles.