Japanese road construction company Taisei Rotec Corporation will build a large-scale pavement test track in Tamura City, Fukushima Prefecture. This will be the first facility of the kind owned by a private company in Japan. Construction will begin in FY2023 and the facility will be operational by the end of FY2024.

In addition to the test track, the facility will have a building for controlling and managing the automated driving of the trucks used in the tests, and a truck yard for inspection and maintenance of the trucks. The durability of the pavement technology will be evaluated by continuously driving the trucks at 40 km/h on the elliptical test track which stretches about1 km per lap. Typically, it takes 10 to 20 years to verify the durability of the pavement technology on actual roads before it is implemented and widely used. By using this facility, the durability evaluation period can be significantly shortened, leading to early implementation in society. (2023/04/06)