No driver, no fare: Singapore’s AV rides are free for Punggol residents from Monday

SINGAPORE, June 19 — Punggol residents will soon be able to hop on fully driverless shuttle rides for free as ComfortDelGro (CDG) opens its autonomous vehicle service to the public from June 22.

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) and CDG said the service will run daily, with Mondays and Fridays set aside for group bookings, families and passengers who require assistance, The Straits Times reported today.

The current route takes about 25 minutes, linking Block 420A Northshore Drive, Punggol Coast Mall and One Punggol (Sam Kee LRT station), with a longer 50-minute loop planned from July.

Bookings are required and can be made via https://zig.sg/driverless.

The five-seater autonomous vehicles are supplied by Chinese firm Pony.ai and operate with a safety officer onboard who can take over if necessary.

The public rollout follows an invite-only trial that began in April and has since carried more than 1,500 passengers, including residents and community representatives.

Earlier operations were paused after a January 17 incident in which a vehicle struck a road divider, with LTA later concluding the safety operator had taken control even though the system had responded correctly to an object on the road.

Subsequently, LTA and CDG revised protocols governing transitions between autonomous and manual driving and imposed additional mileage requirements before resuming trials.

CDG is one of two operators testing autonomous shuttle services in Punggol under Singapore’s wider push to integrate driverless transport into its public network.

The other operator is Grab, which has already transported more than 5,000 passengers and logged over 60,000km of autonomous mileage since starting public rides in April.

Grab is expected to begin charging S$4 (RM12.81) per trip when paid services start in mid-2026, while CDG has yet to announce its pricing plans.