Taiwanese PC brand Acer will begin using an industrial park in Tainan in the first quarter of 2019 to test its research and development capabilities for driverless cars.

The company signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on Monday with the National Applied Research Laboratories (NARLabs) to make use of the 1.75-hectare test site NARLabs runs in the Shalun Green Energy Science City.

Acer unveiled a self-driving concept car in September in collaboration with Yulon Group. The test area will help the company integrate its expertise in artificial intelligence and the cloud with Yulon's self-developed open vehicle platform.

The complex environment will enable its AI-powered cars to collect more diverse data from real-time positioning, cameras, and Lidar (light detection and ranging) sensors to allow better decision-making, Acer said.

Science and Technology Minister Chen Liang-gee said that about 30 percent of the vehicles on the Taiwanese roads will be driverless by 2030.

The concept car Acer is working on with Yulon car brand Luxgen and automotive electronics provider Haitec is a "level 4-ready" self-driving car based on the Luxgen S3 electric vehicle platform, Acer said. It uses Acer's autonomous driving system for sensing, decision-making and control.

Based on the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) definition of levels of automated driving for on-road vehicles, level 4 is defined as high automation, meaning the vehicle's automated driving system can be activated even if a human driver fails to respond appropriately.