K-City’s Highway to Open as Test Bed for Autonomous Vehicles

K-City Highway will open as a test bed where autonomous vehicle technology developers can test their technologies in an environment similar to actual situations beginning on November 7.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport is building K-City, a virtual city for testing autonomous vehicles, on land of 320,000 square meters on the test track at the Korea Automobile Safety Research Institute of the Korea Transportation Safety Authority by investing roughly 11 billion won. Aiming to become the world's best autonomous car test bed, K-City is expected to be completed at the end of 2018 by recreating an actual environment with highways, downtowns, suburbs and parking lots.

The ministry will establish and open a highway environment of K-City ahead of others in order to support the development of technology for the commercialization of autonomous vehicles at Level 3 (drivers’ intervention in the case of an unexpected situation) in 2020 and the early commercialization of self-driving vehicles.

This highway will be a one-kilometer road four lanes and one lane in the opposite direction and reproduce automatic toll booths, branches and confluence points, median strips and noise barrier walls among others.

This highway allows tests in a variety of situations such as passing through narrow ways for toll booths, reducing or increasing the number of lanes before and after toll booths, cutting in line at branches and confluence points and communication and signal failures due to noise barrier walls and median strips.

"The opening of the highway in K-City first is expected to expedite Korea’s development of self-drive cars,” said Kim Chae-kyu, automobile management officer at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. “We will do everything in our power to build K-City, the world's best autonomous car testing bed without a hitch by the end of 2018.”