Table Of Content
It’s orange and black and white, and roughly the same size as a crossover SUV, but somehow looks much larger from the outside. There is no obvious front to the vehicle, no hood, no driver or passenger side windows, no side-view mirrors. By Andrew J. Hawkins, transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. Additionally, many of the collisions our AVs did encounter were at low speeds and were not caused by our AVs’ driving behavior. We are incredibly proud of the many technical innovations developed at Cruise that made this achievement possible, but we aren’t satisfied with just building great technology.
Our driving environment
Cruise has received funding from other leading companies and investors—including Honda, Microsoft, T. Rowe Price, and Walmart. Cruise's path to autonomous driving creates opportunities for increased mobility and independence. That investment and the other billions GM has plowed into Cruise now look a little questionable. In 2018, a self-driving vehicle being tested by Uber struck and killed a woman in Arizona. The company had gained worldwide notoriety for a “move fast and break things” approach to transportation.
Now in Phoenix
“We’re at a unique moment in time, where anything an AV does, even if it is awkward or something interesting or ... Maybe a human wouldn’t do it exactly that way, it becomes a national headline,” he said. Cruise first unveiled the Origin robotaxi in early 2020 as a bus-like vehicle built for the sole purpose of shuttling people around in a city autonomously.
Robotaxi testing and permits
We’re expecting that number to double by mid 2023 and continue to scale exponentially as our fleet grows in the coming years. Throughout Cruise’s history we’ve accomplished many milestones while inventing the technical playbook for urban Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Back in November 2021, we were the first company to complete a fully driverless ride in a major US city. Since then, we launched the first paid driverless robotaxi service in San Francisco. Cruise’s initial response to the October crash suggested it was a freak incident—one unavoidable by even a human driver.
The future of AI gadgets is just phones
We are committed to safely deploying our technology in close collaboration with officials and communities at every step. We believe driverless technology has the potential to save lives, enhance access and improve communities. Since becoming part of General Motors in March 2016,[17] Cruise has been working on developing software and hardware to make fully autonomous vehicles using modified Chevrolet Bolts. Last week, Cruise finished its preliminary testing of driverless cars in Charlotte and began initial tests in Raleigh. Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of General Motors, said Monday it has begun manual data collection in Seattle and Washington, DC, the first step toward launching commercial services in the cities. On Monday, Cruise said it planned to begin deploying a limited number of its Origin vehicles for ride-hail services in Dubai from 2023, its first overseas commercial service.
GM's Reuss: Driverless Cruise vehicles will go back on US roads - Detroit Free Press
GM's Reuss: Driverless Cruise vehicles will go back on US roads.
Posted: Fri, 02 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Its main rival, Google spinoff Waymo, has been testing its fully driverless vehicles in Phoenix for over a year, and recently announced it would be making its Level 4 taxi service available to more customers. The company had planned to launch a commercial taxi service in 2019 but failed to do so, and it has yet to publicly commit to a new date. The current trends in transportation safety indicate that human driving has worsened in recent years, despite advancements in automotive safety features like airbags and proximity sensors. In contrast, the safety record from our first million driverless miles is just the starting point in our AVs’ safety performance. Advancements in technologies such as AI and machine learning, higher-performance computers, and state-of-the-art sensors offer a previously unimaginable potential for improvements in our AVs’ technology.
A few days later, the company said it would pause driverless operations across the US, in cities including Austin, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona. Seattle and DC are two out of 16 total cities in which Cruise is either mapping, testing or deploying its self-driving cars. Cruise’s formula for rollouts typically starts with entering a new market with test vehicles to collect data and map, followed by AV testing with a human driver in the front seat.
Cruise is now testing fully driverless cars in San Francisco
We’re reintroducing a small fleet of manually-operated vehicles to begin mapping with trained safety drivers behind the wheel. The company currently offers a free driverless service in downtown and central Austin, including the University of Texas campus, from 9 p.m. The company said in March it would begin testing its Origins in the city within the coming weeks but has not confirmed if it has done so. Cruise first soft-launched its robotaxi service in Chandler, a city southeast of Phoenix, in December 2022.
GM’s Cruise robotaxis are back in Phoenix — but people are driving them
In 2017, Cruise was conducting testing on public roads with Cruise AVs in San Francisco, Scottsdale, Arizona, and the metropolitan Detroit area. This means we always look for opportunities to improve and expand our AVs’ capabilities. It took thousands of highly trained engineers to achieve the driving performance of a typical 16-year-old, and millions of engineering hours to subsequently achieve our current performance of operating more safely than the average human-operated vehicle. We will continue to work tirelessly to accelerate our progress day by day, and expand our operations wherever we can to maximize our positive impacts on our roads and communities as soon as possible. When Cruise’s driverless AVs first took to public roads in 2021, we made history as the first company to complete a fully driverless ride in San Francisco. By February 2023, our AVs collectively drove one million driverless miles — a distance equivalent to more than 40 laps around the planet — in fifteen short months.
GM also said this week it would temporarily halt production of the Origin, a purpose-built robotaxi vehicle that Cruise had been testing in San Francisco and Austin. Most autonomous vehicle companies have stuck to testing along the sun belt or in cities with mild weather. Inclement weather like rain or snow can affect the ability of sensors, like lidar, radar and cameras, to accurately perceive the environment and make safe driving decisions. As a rainy city with plenty of hills, Seattle will present a unique challenge for Cruise’s self-driving system. Cruise’s plan to test its vehicles in New York City — arguably the most difficult driving environment in the US — went nowhere.
Currently, 60 companies have an active permit to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver in California. The vehicle’s lack of traditional human controls means that Cruise needs an exemption from the federal government’s motor vehicle safety standards, which require vehicles to have a steering wheel and pedals. Cruise persisted in launching its service in the city despite reports that its vehicles sometimes froze in the middle of the traffic, impeded emergency responders on their way to fires and crashes, and held up city buses and streetcars. The news that the company will be relying less on its operations staff during its testing comes after Cruise’s safety drivers have complained about a lack of safety standards during the pandemic and subsequent wildfires.
Learn how our data visualization tool shaped the future of autonomous driving. Cruise ridehail services are not available at this time, but you can join the waitlist to be one of the first. I have so many more questions — about the sensor suite, the business model, the testing (if any) that Cruise has conducted — but I’m informed that our time is done. The event is being managed by a unionized workforce, and any additional time could cost Cruise an additional $12,000. I thank Vogt for his time and jokingly ask if there’s an “abort” button in the vehicle. The not-a-car sits on the gleaming black stage surrounded by a halo of light.
In early August, the company expanded its radius in the Phoenix area by 20x to include Tempe and Scottsdale. For “power users” initially, and then will roll out to members of the general public. In the week that followed, Cruise vehicles were involved in a series of incidents, including 10 robotaxis stalling and causing gridlock, a vehicle that drove into wet cement, and a crash with a fire truck that left a passenger injured. As a result, the California Department of Motor Vehicles requested that Cruise immediately reduce its robotaxi fleet by 50% in San Francisco while it conducts an investigation into the company. Vogt also said the novelty of the technology is why the media covers Cruise’s vehicles differently than they do with human-driven cars.
Inside are two bench seats facing each other, a pair of screens on either end... The absence of all the stuff you expect to see when climbing into a vehicle is jarring. No steering wheel, no pedals, no gear shift, no cockpit to speak of, no obvious way for a human to take control should anything go wrong. Founded in 2013, Cruise makes self-driving cars that have the potential to save millions of lives, reshape our cities, give people more spare time, and restore freedom of movement for many. We are incredibly grateful to the many members of our community who have collaborated with us to get this far.
Cruise says its car, guided by a remote assistance worker, followed human-driven cars and passed the firefighter at a distance of about 9 feet, but as in San Francisco, the Austin emergency departments appeared fed up—and concerned about potential disaster. In an all-hands meeting Monday focused on Cruise’s response to its trouble in California, CEO Vogt told employees that a timeline for job eliminations would come in the next few weeks. The company began laying off contract workers in cleaning, charging, and maintenance roles today.
Cruise said in a blog post Wednesday that it would increase transparency, and that it had retained a law firm to review the October crash and an independent engineering firm to review all of its safety and engineering processes. “As we build a better Cruise, we’re evaluating a variety of potential actions to ensure we operate at the highest standards of safety, transparency, and accountability,” Cruise spokesperson Navideh Forghani wrote in a statement. “Phase 1 is to familiarize our fleet with additional, diverse road conditions while collecting data,” the company said at the time in a tweet. Vogt said in September at a Goldman Sachs event that Cruise partly chose Japan to test how its autonomous tech does on streets where people drive on the left side of the road. Cruise began mapping Dubai in July 2022 in preparation for a planned launch in 2023. The company said it hopes to put Cruise Origins on Dubai’s streets this year.
No comments:
Post a Comment