Hamburg borough of Harburg drives forward with autonomous shuttles
Just last week, another Hamburg public transport provider, Hamburger Hochbahn, announced it would begin putting autonomous shuttles onto the streets of Hamburg in the city centre with Volkswagen company Moia, among others, in the same period of the second half of 2025, similarly building up to 20 autonomous vehicles, but in a far denser part of the inner city where considerably more public transport options are available. In contrast, the ‘ahoi’ project announced by transport engineering firm IAV today, carried out with Germany’s third largest municipal bus services provider, VHH, with electric shuttles from eVersum, will operate in the Hamburg borough of Harburg, which lies on the southernmost banks of the Elbe river delta.
The ‘ahoi’ project (which stands for Automation of the Hamburg On-Demand Service with Integration into Public Transport) builds on existing on-demand shuttle bus services called “hvv hop” shuttles. These have been very successful in Hamburg, and most particularly so in the borough of Harburg, where public transport services do not adequately cover all areas.
The project ‘ahoi’ aims to gradually eliminate the need for a driver in shuttle bus services. The partners cite one of the needs driving the project as being the lack of skilled workers to staff public transport services in Germany.
For the ‘ahoi’ autonomous shuttle bus service in the southernmost borough of Harburg, in Hamburg, eVersum will provide its modular eShuttle from in the 6.90-meter-long version with 9 seats and additional space for a wheelchair or stroller. Holger Postl, Managing Director of eVersum explained: “After the first successful deployments of such semi-autonomous vehicles in Mannheim and Friedrichshafen, we are very much looking forward to working with vhh.mobility and IAV to get as many passengers as possible to their destinations safely and comfortably.”
Dr Lorenz Kasch, Managing Director of vhh.mobility explained, “When the vehicles are delivered, we will begin test operations with safety drivers on board and no passengers in the second phase of the ‘ahoi’ project.” He said that as soon as all requirements have been developed to the satisfaction of the partners, “We will then open scheduled operations with the autonomous vehicles for our passengers in the Harburg service area in phase 3 – and this in addition to the manually controlled hvv hop shuttles.”
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