Autonomous Vehicle Technology Driverless Cars

Table Of Content

• GM Slashes Spending on Robotaxi Unit Cruise, a Setback for Driverless Cars
• GM’s Cruise to Resume Testing Robotaxi Service in Phoenix
• Pedestrian injuries
• Cruise (autonomous vehicle)
• Partnership is essential to powering Cruise for Good: Behind the scenes of our meal delivery program
• GM’s Ultra Cruise will use radar, camera, and lidar to enable hands-free driving
• Incidents

For Super Cruise, visit cadillac.com/supercruise for compatible roads and full details. The primary HMI in Ultra Cruise-equipped vehicles, the Ultra Cruise Dynamic Display, is a freeform display directly in the driver’s line of sight. Smart diagnostic and learning systems automatically identify scenarios where Ultra Cruise needs upgrading, triggering data recordings in vehicles equipped with the service. These recordings will then be processed through GM’s back office data ecosystem for continuous improvement of the system. Ultra Cruise will cover more than 2 million miles of roads at launch in the United States and Canada, with the capacity to grow up to more than 3.4 million miles. Customers will be able to travel truly hands free with Ultra Cruise across nearly every road including city streets, subdivision streets and paved rural roads, in addition to highways.

GM Slashes Spending on Robotaxi Unit Cruise, a Setback for Driverless Cars

Now Cruise appears to be going back to basics, a sharp pivot away from the aggressive growth strategy the company has been pursuing for the last few years. In 2022, former Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt — who stepped down amid last year’s controversy — told investors that Cruise had “de-risked the technical approach” by applying what worked well in San Francisco to similar ride-share markets.

GM’s Cruise to Resume Testing Robotaxi Service in Phoenix

They also have experience dealing with local regulators who do not always welcome more competition for public transit or licensed cabs. GM has said the operation can generate revenue of $50 billion a year by 2030. The shakeout in the AV sector has cleared the field for Cruise to grow.

Pedestrian injuries

Until the accident, Cruise had been operating driverless taxis in three US cities—San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin—with plans to expand. In October, the company said it would no longer operate its vehicles without safety drivers behind the wheel. The automaker’s driverless car subsidiary, Cruise, announced last night the resignation of Kyle Vogt as CEO. The decision came over a month after an incident in which a hit-and-run victim became pinned under a Cruise vehicle and then was dragged 20 feet to the side of the road. As a result, California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s permit to operate driverless cars in the state.

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The decision by Ford and Volkswagen to pull the plug on their jointly-controlled automated vehicle operation, Argo AI, threw the entire automated vehicle sector into a tailspin. Investors have hammered the shares of public AV tech companies and driven a wave of consolidation deals. "You'll likely see us expand the number of markets in a large number next year," he said. Cruise believes it can accelerate application of its technology to other cities using a "repeatable playbook" developed in San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix. That should start to deliver revenue numbers with more zeros in them, he said.

Cruise (autonomous vehicle)

In 2022, AV investments went down nearly 60 percent year over year as startups struggled through layoffs or outright closures. Prior to the accident, Cruise was planning an aggressive expansion of robotaxis outside its home market where the majority of its vehicles operated. Cruise has been in turmoil since its CEO, Kyle Vogt, resigned earlier this month following an accident where a driverless car collided with a pedestrian, who had already been struck by a human hit-and-run driver. In its first major update since announcing Ultra Cruise in late 2021, the automaker outlined several of the sensors that will power the driver-assist system, including cameras, short- and long-range radar, and a lidar sensor. The vehicles will also come with an all-new computer to process the data input from the sensors, which the automaker previously indicated would include Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Ride Platform.

GM has owned Cruise since 2016 and Cruise was operating its robo-taxi fleets in San Francisco, Austin, Texas, and Phoenix until it stopped all operations and recalled its fleet of 950 modified Bolts in November after the incident. As the Detroit Free Press reported in the fall, Cruise managers omitted key details to regulators about the California incident. The omissions led to allegations of Cruise deliberately misleading authorities, which could result in hefty fines. In January, for example, Cruise offered to pay $75,000 to state regulators to resolve an investigation, as the Detroit Free Press reported.

GM’s Ultra Cruise will use radar, camera, and lidar to enable hands-free driving

We believe driverless technology has the potential to save lives, enhance access and improve communities. Ultra Cruise will join GM’s lineup of hands-free advanced driver-assist systems on select models in 2023, with Cadillac being the first to introduce the technology. GM is also developing an Ultra Cruise app that will be viewable in the center display of Ultra Cruise-equipped vehicles only when the vehicle is parked. The app will provide more centrally located information, including driver’s statistics, trips and history. Ultra Cruise is powered by a 5-nanometer, scalable compute architecture future-proofed through the Ultifi software platform and Vehicle Intelligence Platform.

Technological issues aside, what really put Cruise in hot water late last year was its response to the incident. Regulators accused the company of withholding information about the crash, only sharing that a Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian who had been flung into its path after first being struck by a human-driven vehicle. "In October 2023, we paused operations of our fleet to focus on rebuilding trust with regulators and the communities we serve, and to redesign our approach to safety," Cruise said in a blog post. Cruise said its "goal is to resume driverless operations," however it did not provide a timeline for doing so. It also did not announce a timetable for expanding human-driven vehicles to other cities.

In November, the Detroit Free Press reported GM paused production of the Cruise Origin at Factory Zero. You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. The company said in January that investigations or inquiries into the incident included those by the California DMV, the California Public Utilities Commission, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the U.S. A third-party probe into the October incident and subsequent fallout, which was ordered by GM and Cruise, found culture issues, ineptitude and poor leadership were at the center of regulatory oversights that led to the accident. The probe also investigated allegations of a coverup by Cruise leadership, but did not find any evidence to support those claims.

GM’s Cruise robotaxis are back in Phoenix — but people are driving them - TechCrunch

GM’s Cruise robotaxis are back in Phoenix — but people are driving them.

Posted: Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Before the accident, the company had plans for commercial launches in Dallas, Houston, and Miami. 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. 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. According to the Times, the company “put a priority on the speed of the program over safety.” In many ways, it echoes Uber’s infamous approach to self-driving cars, which cut corners on safety in order to get more cars on the road. Eventually, an Uber self-driving car killed a woman crossing the street in Arizona, which resulted in the company shuttering the whole division.

GM's Cruise to Resume Testing Robotaxi Service in Phoenix - Bloomberg

GM's Cruise to Resume Testing Robotaxi Service in Phoenix.

Posted: Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]

A key component of Ultra Cruise is its Human Machine Interface, through which the system presents information to the driver and communicates when they need to be in control of the vehicle. Building on the HMI currently used in Super Cruise, Ultra Cruise’s HMI also shows drivers that they and the system are seeing the same thing. “The combination of Ultra Cruise for premium offerings and Super Cruise for lower-cost products will enable us to offer driver-assist technology across price points and segments,” said Parks. The planned launch of the Origin, designed as a purpose-built automated vehicle, "is a huge unlock" for Cruise because of its lower cost, West said. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission opened investigations into Cruise following the October incident in California.

Cruise has not announced when or where it will resume driverless operations. The company’s main operations were historically based in San Francisco, but Cruise lost its permits to operate there following the accident. Cruise began expanding its paid service area in the Phoenix area in August 2023. In 2017, Cruise was conducting testing on public roads with Cruise AVs in San Francisco, Scottsdale, Arizona, and the metropolitan Detroit area. Lidar, a key ingredient in autonomous driving, is a laser sensor that uses near-infrared light to detect the shapes of objects. This helps autonomous vehicles “see” other objects on the road, like cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, all without the help of GPS or a network connection.

The company said the vehicle stopped, but then pulled over to move out of traffic, dragging the woman 20 feet along the road. She later had to be rescued from underneath the vehicle by the San Francisco fire department. But as lidar costs fall, other automakers have embraced the hardware for its ability to render a 3D map of its environment and all nearby objects. In addition to GM, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz have recently announced their intention to include lidar in future production vehicles. And as Ditman put it, the decision to include lidar is less about money and more about safety. We’re reintroducing a small fleet of manually-operated vehicles to begin mapping with trained safety drivers behind the wheel.