Part of a series of features on the tech industry and its impact on commercial vehicles, this piece looks at established firms and start-ups based around Toronto and in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, both situated in southern Ontario, Canada.

Algolux specialises in perception software to improve computer vision for advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles.

With Fernride’s technology, drivers will be able to “teleoperate” the tractors – that is to say, they will be able to drive them remotely – and take advantage of assistance systems that Terberg and Fernride will “gradually” develop in order to make the vehicles more and more autonomous.

She joins the company at a critical time as it prepares for the commercial launch next year

Testing of the Iveco Bus / Plus Inc heavy-duty truck (Iveco S-Way) installed with Plus’s level 4 autonomous driving technology (‘PlusDrive’), is set to expand from Germany into Austria, Italy and Switzerland in March 2023 in order to collect more complex road data and ultimately go into series production.

The upgraded software has added safety capabilities such as responding to emergency vehicles (fire trucks and ambulances etc) and an improved ability to re-enter traffic and navigate lane changes.

Entrepreneurs and representatives of start-ups are given access to engineers and mentors from Volvo who help them to bring their product and service concepts to market.

There is a five-mile extension of the existing 14-mile autonomous bus trial (CAVForth) from Edinburgh Park station across the Forth Road Bridge in the UK in an attempt to gather more complex data, utilising an upgraded version of Fusion’s CAVStar autonomous driving software and ADL’s Enviro100EV electric bus.

IDV hope to build on Horiba Mira’s expertise in remote control, teleoperated and autonomous vehicle technology.

ZF states that upgrading to 5G will ensure that demands for seamless connectivity and large data transfers between vehicles and other nodes in the network are met at its test track.

UK bus and coach operator, Stagecoach, tested the first autonomous bus (Alexander Dennis Enviro200AV) to carry passengers over the Forth Road Bridge, near Edinburgh, as part of the CAVForth project.

In conditions of poor visibility, human drivers often struggle to safely navigate their vehicles, and AI drivers have even greater difficulties. This month, T&BB spoke to CEO and co-founder of Sensible 4, Harri Santamala, about the company and its product, DAWN – an autonomous driving technology specifically designed to deal with all weathers and all visibility conditions.