Helsinki tested autonomous buses in weather that breaks them

The FABULOS pilot — an all-weather autonomous bus demonstration in a city where snow, ice and darkness are the normal operating condition, not an edge case.

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Piloted by

Vehicles by

Setting: Pasila, Helsinki
Service model: Autonomous, on-demand off-peak
Programme: FABULOS · Horizon 2020
Coordinated by: Forum Virium Helsinki

GACHA, the Sensible 4 and Muji autonomous bus, standing on an icy square in Helsinki

Results

Autonomous buses

Circulating between Pasila station and the Messukeskus fair centre through working hours.

All-weather

GACHA

Built by Sensible 4 and designed by Muji as a vehicle conceived to be shared.

Gjesdal

A second pilot

Learnings transferred straight into a residential FABULOS test in Norway.

The challenge

Autonomous buses, in weather that breaks them

Most autonomous demonstrations happen somewhere mild, dry and well-marked. Their results say little about a city where road markings vanish under snow and the sun sets in the early afternoon — every autonomous vehicle on the market today carries restrictions on where it can circulate.

Pasila is also a place worth getting right. Tripla Mall is a mobility hub joining rail and bus terminals, tram stops and bike parking; by 2035 around 100,000 people a day are expected to pass through it on their way to offices, housing and public services.

Driver salaries account for roughly half the running cost of a public bus, so the prize is real — but only if the vehicles can be dispatched on demand rather than driven round a loop.

100,000

daily users expected at Tripla by 2035

~50%

of bus running cost is driver salary

What we deployed

A fixed loop at peak, on-demand when it empties

01
Three fixed stops
A loop between Pasila station and Messukeskus, continuous at peak times.
02
On-demand off-peak
When the loop emptied, riders requested pickup at any stop from the app.
03
White label app
The rider-facing service published under the pilot’s own brand.
04
Custom APIs
Built to exchange information between Shotl’s platform and the vehicles.

Bookings translated into driving instructions

A rider request became a route the vehicle could execute: Shotl’s platform turned the booking into driving instructions and relayed it to the nearest bus through Boldly’s fleet management layer, via APIs built for the pilot.

An autonomous vehicle without that layer has no interface to its passengers. The app is what turns a driverless bus into a service someone can actually use.

How the integrations work

On site

Riders walk up to the vehicle on ice and slush — the condition the bus was built for.
Boarding — off-peak, riders request a pickup at any of the three stops from the app.
Inside: no cab, no driver’s seat — just seats, and the next stop on the display.

Renske Martijnse-HartikkaProject Coordinator, Forum Virium Helsinki

“The autonomous bus as it is, is not yet enough. It needs to be connected to the users, to the public. So, together with Shotl, we can make a total product, a total system — not just autonomous.”

Jussi SuomelaCo-founder, Sensible 4

Similar challenges

What the pilot actually proves

Not that autonomous transport is ready — but that on-demand dispatch and driverless vehicles can be joined, in real conditions, with a rider-facing app that behaves like any other service. Deploying only when requested during off-peak hours is where the efficiency comes from.

The learnings transferred immediately: Shotl set up a second FABULOS test in a residential area of Gjesdal, Norway, off the back of this one. The remaining work is vehicles that choose between routes on their own, and one operator monitoring several buses from a remote centre.

The direction is a network of vehicles that are connected, electric, shared and autonomous at once — with a dispatching layer holding the service together.

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