Cruise acquires Voyage in another autonomous vehicle merger

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• The founder of olive oil brand Brightland’s first career in communications taught her an essential lesson for every CEO
• Technology
• Cruise’s driverless autonomous cars start giving rides to paying passengers
• The case against work friends: The office has changed. Maybe it’s time our relationships do too
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We also measure our perception and prediction systems against our elevated performance criteria, using trained safety drivers as a benchmark. At this stage, no autonomous systems are engaged and the vehicles will not carry public passengers. 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. The company is among the first to test its driverless vehicles in a dense, complex urban environment. Koopman says the safety narrative can unravel when people see the driverless cars on city streets making the same mistakes as human drivers. He says he'd like to see the companies focus on making sure the technology is actually safe.

Cruise Self-Driving Vehicles Return to Phoenix Roads - IoT World Today

Cruise Self-Driving Vehicles Return to Phoenix Roads.

Posted: Wed, 10 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]

The founder of olive oil brand Brightland’s first career in communications taught her an essential lesson for every CEO

This will help inform where we ultimately will resume driverless operations. Both Cruise and Waymo say their driverless cars are safer than human drivers – they don't get drunk, text or fall asleep at the wheel. The companies say they've driven millions of driverless miles without any human fatalities and the roads are safer with their autonomous systems in charge. 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.

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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. I don’t typically hear AV companies talk about “unit economics” and profitability. But that’s going to creep up sooner than a lot of people realize, Vogt says.

Cruise’s driverless autonomous cars start giving rides to paying passengers

Not-car inventions that seriously changed how we travel, in other words. Cruise says it wants to “move beyond the car,” but I’m not convinced the absence of certain controls negates its inherent car-ness. As Vogt points out, it occupies the same amount of space as an SUV, and Cruise claims it can travel at normal city speeds. It is a car-like shape and does car-type things, like traveling down a road with people in it.

The case against work friends: The office has changed. Maybe it’s time our relationships do too

But Cruise thinks its abundance of space can help minimize the friction. On Oct. 2, a car hit a woman in a San Francisco intersection and flung her into the path of one of Cruise’s driverless taxis. The Cruise car ran over her, briefly stopped and then dragged her some 20 feet before pulling to the curb, causing severe injuries. 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. Prior to that incident, Cruise had been announcing launches in new cities — including Dallas, Houston and Miami — at a startling pace.

California allows robo-taxis to expand and emergency responders aren't happy

I thank Vogt for his time and jokingly ask if there’s an “abort” button in the vehicle. Cruise has been working on the design of the Origin for over three years, but Honda’s involvement “super charged” the effort. The two automakers didn’t collaborate on every tiny detail; instead, they split up the work based on their expertise. GM was responsible for the base vehicle design and the electric powertrain, while Honda helped create the interior’s “efficient use of space,” Vogt says.

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. When asked a hypothetical question about public operations beginning within the next two to three years, Ammann said that "sounds reasonable to me."

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Experts estimate that each self-driving car could cost upward of $300,000-$400,000, when taking into account the expensive sensors and computing software needed to allow the vehicles to drive themselves. Recouping those costs will be enormously challenging, and Cruise is trying to address that by building a car with more staying power than most personally owned vehicles. Critics say the cars get easily confused by common situations on city streets.

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]

Commercializing autonomous vehicles has been far more challenging than many predicted even a few years ago. The challenges have led to a consolidation in the autonomous vehicle sector after years of enthusiasm touting the technology as the next multitrillion-dollar market for transportation companies. Cruise's current test fleet is composed of hundreds of custom Chevrolet Bolt EVs equipped with driverless technology. Ammann said that fleet, which it plans to launch operations with, will continue to expand until the Origin goes into production. On the night of October 2, one of Cruise's driverless cars struck a pedestrian in San Francisco leaving her critically injured and fighting for her life.

Two days later, Cruise went further and voluntarily suspended all of its driverless operations around the country, taking 400 or so driverless cars off the road. Since then, Cruise’s board has hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to investigate the company’s response to the incident, including its interactions with regulators, law enforcement and the media. Voyage is a spinoff from Udacity, an online learning service that offers courses in driverless technology.

The company started offering public rides in February this year, and it started charging fares in June. Cruise, a majority-owned autonomous vehicle subsidiary of General Motors, expects production of its driverless shuttle called the Origin to begin in early 2023, CEO Dan Ammann said Thursday. "We're on a trajectory that most businesses dream of, which is exponential growth," Vogt said during a July call with investors.

Cruise has already made huge leaps in teaching a car to drive itself, once the stuff of science-fiction movies. But Cruise also needs artificial intelligence and machine learning at a level that, frankly, nobody has seen before. Cruise had to ensure that its vehicles could handle as many driving scenarios as possible before starting testing its service with employees in November. Since then, the company has provided “hundreds of rides,” with half of its trips since Feb. 1 being with members of the public, a Cruise spokesperson says. Meanwhile, The Intercept reported that Cruise cars had difficulty detecting children, according to internal documents.

Additionally, autonomous cars must know how to deal with the “social aspects of driving,” like reacting to a police car that flashes its lights to signal that the self-driving car should pull over, Vogt says. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt knows first-hand how difficult it is to create self-driving cars that are as capable as humans. 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.