Monday, April 1, 2024

Exclusive look at Cruises first driverless car without a steering wheel or pedals

cruise autonomous

As we continue working to rebuild trust and determine the city where we will scale driverless, we also remain focused on continuing to improve our performance and overall safety approach. To that end, Cruise is resuming manual driving to create maps and gather road information in select cities, starting in Phoenix. This work is done using human-driven vehicles without autonomous systems engaged, and is a critical step for validating our self-driving systems as we work towards returning to our driverless mission. GM’s regulatory approval likely hinges on how the company responds to questions surrounding the safety of its current crop of autonomous vehicles. In San Francisco, where Cruise says it operate nearly 400 fully driverless Chevy Bolt vehicles, the company has faced questions from city officials about incidents involving traffic jams and blocked emergency responders. Cruise was forced to reduce its fleet size after one of its vehicles collided with a fire truck, injuring a passenger.

The GM-backed company is one of the first to launch Level 4 vehicles in a dense, complex urban setting

Cameron headed the startup’s open-source self-driving project before launching his own venture. Sebastian Thrun, Udacity’s chairman and one of the founders of Google’s self-driving car project, was briefly chairman of Voyage before a conflict forced him to step down. The company operates a fleet of self-driving cars in two retirement communities, one near San Jose, California, and the other north of Orlando, Florida, both called The Villages. But Voyage doesn’t want to be seen as the exclusive AV service for senior citizens. Even so, Cruise isn’t the first company to build and test a self-driving car without traditional controls. In December 2016, Google stunned the world when it revealed that it had put a blind man in one of its egg-shaped autonomous test vehicles and sent him out for a short ride around Austin, Texas.

Now in Phoenix

"We are focused on our path to commercialization right now but the IPOs happening in the space right now are a great indication of the strength of the industry and the opportunity self-driving presents," a Cruise spokeswoman said in a statement to Reuters. Cruise has hired a law firm to investigate how it responded to regulators, as its cars sit idle and questions grow about its C.E.O.’s expansion plans. Cruise, with Honda’s help, designed the interior of the vehicle primarily for shared rides. The screens, one on either side, will display an itinerary for picking up and dropping off each passenger, so riders know what to expect. Carpooling in the age of smartphones hasn’t exactly been the runaway success that ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft have hoped.

Cruise driverless cars pulled off California roads after safety incidents - The Guardian US

Cruise driverless cars pulled off California roads after safety incidents.

Posted: Wed, 25 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Incidents

Cruise mainly operates its autonomous vehicles in dense, urban settings like downtown San Francisco, while Voyage oversees a fleet of low-speed autonomous vehicles providing trips to residents of several retirement communities. Both companies have tested their vehicles without a safety driver behind the wheel and aspire to launch full-fledged commercial robot taxi services. Cruise, the self-driving car company affiliated with General Motors and Honda, is testing fully driverless cars, without a human safety driver behind the steering wheel, in San Francisco.

cruise autonomous

Driving continuous safety improvements

In July 2019, the company announced that it would miss its goal of launching a large-scale self-driving taxi service by the end of the year. It tried to sugarcoat the disappointing news by announcing a plan to dramatically increase the number of its test vehicles on the road in San Francisco. Cruise was approved to test fully driverless cars (also called Level 4 in industry parlance) in California on October 15th. According to the DMV, Cruise can only test five driverless vehicles “on specified streets within San Francisco.” The vehicles are not allowed to exceed 30 mph, and can’t operate during heavy fog or heavy rain. GM-backed Cruise is “just days away” from regulatory approval to begin mass production of its fully autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals, the company’s CEO, Kyle Vogt, said at an investor conference Thursday. We’ve achieved the impressive safety record of our first million driverless miles through the safety-minded approach detailed in our 2022 Safety Report.

(Cruise had rebuffed the Times’ request to speak to Vogt before publication.) Meanwhile, his robotaxi company still isn’t running service, and GM is is spending more than $500 million every quarter to operate it. GM seemed eager to give Vogt and his once-startup the freedom to be aggressive in rolling out robotaxis. Leadership put the milder-mannered company veteran Dan Ammann in charge of the subsidiary in 2018, then recalled him and reinstalled Vogt in 2021 after the company failed to launch driverless service by a self-imposed deadline.

Cruise recalls all of its self driving cars to fix their programming - CNN

Cruise recalls all of its self driving cars to fix their programming.

Posted: Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Despite these challenges, and in fact because of them, we intentionally chose to deploy our AVs in San Francisco. Driving in one of the most difficult environments in the US has allowed us to deliver a safer experience where the need is most pressing, and has accelerated our progress towards deploying AVs in other places where this need exists. Sensors can see 360 degrees, hundreds of feet ahead, and around that double-parked car. Cruise cars make sense of this data in a split second, tracking every important object in view. Cruise's relationship with Walmart includes a trial delivery service in Scottsdale, Arizona, announced in November.

Cruise (autonomous vehicle)

We believe AVs will save lives and significantly reduce the number and severity of accidents on America’s and Arizona’s roads every year. AVs will also improve lives - including creating  convenient and safe transportation options for the elderly and those with disabilities. As we begin this journey, we look forward to partnering with local communities to jointly achieve our shared mission of making transportation safer for all. Cruise’s AV stack is based on AI technology that learns from information gathered through our driving experience and retrains and evolves our models continuously.

The October incident wasn’t the first time Cruise’s technology has caused problems. Even as Cruise expanded to new cities in the second half of 2023, its robotaxis were routinely malfunctioning in cities like San Francisco and Austin, disrupting the flow of traffic, public transit and first responders. Critics say the cars get easily confused by common situations on city streets. Some activists have taken to placing orange cones on the hoods of Cruise’s vehicles in order to disable them as a form of protest. But Vogt said that too much pushback risks stalling important technological advancements that could save lives. Through these Safety Actions, we will continue to improve our safety record – and reverse the tragic direction of the transportation statistics we see today – through the continuous updates that we roll out mile after driverless mile.

Dubai’s RTA confirmed in April that Cruise has several autonomous Chevy Bolts — at least five can be seen in one video — collecting data and testing in the Jumeirah 1 area, a residential area on the coast. The announcement comes a week after peer TuSimple revealed plans for an initial public offering (IPO), at a time when self-drive technology is yet to be commercialised. Cruise is certainly one of the best capitalized autonomous vehicle companies in the world. In 2018, it secured both a $2.25 billion investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund and a $2 billion investment from Honda.

In 2019, Cruise landed a $1.15 billion investment from GM, SoftBank, Honda, and T. Cruise, a majority-owned subsidiary of General Motors, will acquire self-driving startup Voyage in another major autonomous vehicle merger. The announcement came less than a week after news first surfaced that the two companies were in talks about an acquisition. For example, it doesn’t look like a toaster on wheels, as some autonomous “people movers” tend to do.

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