Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler AG and Robert Bosch GmbH, one of the world’s largest auto parts makers, are joining the race to build self-driving taxis.

The firms today announced that they’ve signed a memorandum of understanding to launch a ride-hailing service powered by autonomous vehicles in the second half of 2019. The program will operate in San Jose, California’s third-largest city.

Daimler’s and Bosch’s planned pilot is one of several scheduled to come online next year. Intel Corp.-owned Mobileye and GM Cruise LLC, General Motors’ $14.6 billion self-driving car group, both plan to start testing self-driving taxis on public roads in 2019. Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Waymo LLC, in turn, is already running a commercial pilot in the Phoenix, Arizona suburb of Chandler.

Daimler and Bosch plan to take a slow and steady approach with their project. The companies’ autonomous vehicles are initially set to operate along just a single corridor between downtown and west San Jose, with human safety drivers behind the wheel.

The pilot will use modified Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedans packed with sensors and onboard computing equipment. The hardware will be powered by Nvidia Corp.’s Drive Pegasus platform, which combines two Xavier system-on-chip units sporting 7 billion transistors each with a pair of graphics accelerators. The entire package is about the size of a license plate and can perform north of 320 trillion operations a second.

Daimler will make the self-driving taxis available to San Jose residents via its collection of mobility services. The lineup includes the company’s Car2go rental service, the MyTaxi ride-hailing app and Moovel, a kind of urban transportation aggregator that lets consumers book rides via the other two apps as well as find public transportation.

“The test operation will provide information about how highly and fully automated vehicles can be integrated into a multi-modal transportation network,” Daimler and Bosch said in a joint release. “The intent is to provide a seamless digital experience, in which a selected user community will have the opportunity to hail a self-driving car, monitored by a safety driver, from a designated pick-up location and drive automatically to their destination.”

Photo: Bosch