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Problems at Cruise could slow the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles that carry passengers without human drivers on board. It also could bring stronger federal regulation of the vehicles, which are carrying passengers in more cities nationwide. During our operational pause over the last few months, Cruise maintained ongoing and extensive testing in complex, dynamic simulated environments and on closed courses, enabling continuous retraining and improvement. Now, we are building on that work to create high-quality semantic maps and gather road information to ensure future operations meet elevated safety and performance targets. And because no two cities are the same, we plan to conduct this manual and supervised driving in multiple cities - starting with Phoenix - to expose our AVs to a diverse set of driving environments and conditions as we prepare for future driverless service.
GM’s Cruise robotaxis are back in Phoenix — but people are driving them
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. That means the Cruise’s not-car will require an exemption from the federal government’s motor vehicle safety standards.
Are autonomous vehicles viable?
Autonomous vehicles need regulations, senators tell NHTSA - Land Line Media
Autonomous vehicles need regulations, senators tell NHTSA.
Posted: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 18:38:24 GMT [source]
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. Now Mr. Vogt’s driverless car company faces its own safety concerns as he contends with angry regulators, anxious employees, and skepticism about his management and the viability of a business that he has often said will save lives while generating billions of dollars. GM acquired Cruise in 2016 amid a race by automakers to get into autonomous vehicles which can help reshape urban environments by allowing for shared rides without owning a car. General Motors’ Cruise autonomous vehicle unit is recalling all 950 of its cars to update software after one of them dragged a pedestrian to the side of a San Francisco street in early October and a subsequent ban by California regulators. Safety is the defining principle for everything we do and will guide our progress through this process.
Suspension of operations
Cruise will resume manual driving of its autonomous vehicles to create maps and gather road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix, the company said Tuesday. The GM subsidiary already had a presence in Phoenix before it pulled its entire U.S.-based fleet last year following an incident in San Francisco that left a pedestrian stuck under and dragged by a Cruise robotaxi. Even so, Cruise isn’t the first company to build and test a self-driving car without traditional controls.
Self-driving car startup Cruise ran into trouble after pedestrian crash - NPR
Self-driving car startup Cruise ran into trouble after pedestrian crash.
Posted: Sat, 30 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
GM Energy and the BrightDrop commercial EV unit continue to operate; however, GM recently brought BrightDrop in-house from being a wholly owned subsidiary. Some Wall Street analysts are holding out hope that GM and Barra can turn Cruise around and eventually refocus on growing the business, as the Detroit automaker takes a more hands-on approach with the company. Cruise, its majority-owned autonomous vehicle subsidiary, is increasingly looking like it might be next. DETROIT — General Motors' plans to diversify its business through trendy industries such as ridesharing and other "mobility" ventures or startups have largely fallen flat since the automaker started investing in such growth areas in 2016.
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Founded in 2013 in San Francisco, US, Cruise fulfils CEO Kyle Vogt’s childhood dream of making self-driving cars a reality. Co-founded by Chief Product Officer Dan Kan, the company was acquired by General Motors in 2016 to bring more than a century of experience in designing and manufacturing vehicles to the autonomous vehicle (AV) effort. 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.
The Origin is the GM subsidiary’s first attempt to build an fully autonomous car from the ground up
The company says it will also work on improved engagement with first responders to facilitate trainings in each precinct it plans to operate in. Prior to that incident, Cruise had been announcing launches in new cities — including Dallas, Houston and Miami — at a startling pace. Critics accused the company of expanding too fast and cutting corners on safety. The relaunch comes after the company ceased operations weeks after an Oct. 2 accident in which a pedestrian in San Francisco was dragged 20 feet by a Cruise robotaxi after being struck by a separate vehicle. During GM’s investor day in October, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann outlined the company’s plan to invest heavily into the compute power of the Origin in order to decrease costs by 90% over the next four generations so it can scale profitably. At the time, Ammann mentioned Cruise’s intention to manufacture custom silicon in-house to cut costs, but didn’t admit outright using that silicon to build a chip — but TechCrunch had its theories.
Over the past several weeks we have communicated directly with officials, first responders, and community leaders in cities we’ve previously operated in to share updates on our path forward. We are committed to safely deploying our technology in close collaboration with officials and communities at every step. General Motors’ Cruise is redeploying robotaxis in Phoenix after nearly five months of paused operations, the company said in a blog post. But it won’t have to remap cities to track changes to the environment that inevitably happen, like lane changes or street closures.
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In a video released by the company, a Cruise employee is seen in the passenger seat while the car drives itself through the darkened streets of San Francisco. Cruise’s vehicles all have an emergency switch in the center channel near the gear shift in case something goes wrong, and they are also monitored remotely by Cruise employees. Asked whether remote operators are able to take control of the vehicle when needed, Ammann declined to answer.
BizClik, based in London, Dubai & New York offers services such as Content Creation, Advertising & Sponsorship Solutions, Webinars & Events. Cruise has received $10B from well-respected companies and investors—including General Motors, Honda, Microsoft, T. Rowe Price, and Walmart—increasing its valuation 30x since being founded. Of course, bureaucracy and politics could drive the whole thing right off the road. Its official name is “Origin,” and Kyle Vogt, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Cruise, is clearly excited to be showing it off. With a broad smile, he reaches out and touches a button on the side, causing the doors to slide open with a little whoosh like something out of Star Wars.
There is no obvious front to the vehicle, no hood, no driver or passenger side windows, no side-view mirrors. 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. 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.
Prior to the accident, Cruise was planning an aggressive expansion of robotaxis outside its home market where the majority of its vehicles operated. "We have not yet made a commitment to where or when we will start supervised or driverless operations," a spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. “The amount of development work to get from nothing to the level of performance to operate without a driver was enormous,” says Vogt. Learn the basics of how a Cruise car navigates city streets safely and efficiently. During a GM investor event Wednesday, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann showed a graphic of the division's "exponential Cruise fleet ramp." The graph pointed to Cruise scaling its operations 1 million or more vehicles by the end of the decade. GM continues to operate a military defense unit and fuel cell business that have both recently announced new contracts or partnerships.
Maybe a human wouldn’t do it exactly that way, it becomes a national headline,” he said. But to date, autonomous vehicles are largely limited to small-scale tests in limited areas, with former Google car division Waymo seen as one of the leading firms. 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.
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. 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.
