Mar. 6 at 8:42 AM
$WRD 🇯🇵 City of Gifu (north of Nagoya)
WeRide status: WeRide is a recent replacement for the earlier Navya-based pilot; originally Gifu ran a Navya shuttle with game‑controller “semi-autonomous” operation, and then switched to the WeRide bus, which is “clearly a different beast.”
The five‑year project (started in 2023 initially with Navya) Gifu is taking on autonomous buses as a 5‑year long‑term initiative to revitalize city-center transport after scrapping trams.
Automation level and cockpit:
It is explicitly described as running effectivel at Level 2 in Gifu (vs. Level 4 deployments elsewhere like Matsuyama).
I noticed that markings on the bus (it also shows the Navya bus in the clip), do not show the WeRide brand. That’s probably because of sensitivites that exist between Japan and China.
Like Matsuyama, it looks still small scale. But another bus in Japan is another bus.
https://youtu.be/rvU1b4SF3nM?is=itccLt5O6BzM5kWm