EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
GM is about to start mass-producing the first ‘real’ self-driving cars
General Motors Co. and its self-driving car subsidiary Cruise Automation said today that they’re ready to mass-produce vehicles that already have fully autonomous hardware built in, meaning once the software is fully up to speed the cars will be good to go.
Unlike other cars currently using self-driving technology, the Chevrolet Bolt EVs, 50 of which have already been made, are built to be autonomous rather than have the technology fitted to them. In a blog post on Medium, Kyle Vogt, founder and chief executive of Cruise Automation, called this the “first real self-driving car.”
“The car we’re unveiling today is actually our 3rd generation self-driving car, but it’s the first that meets the redundancy and safety requirements we believe are necessary to operate without a driver,” said Vogt. “There’s no other car like this in existence.”
Vogt added that the cars will soon appear on the road. Although they look like everyday vehicles, he said, they will be “the most technically advanced robots on the planet.” GM has been testing its self-driving software for some time, but Vogt said the next step was to produce a car that was actually built to have no human operating it.
Vogt said that its fully-autonomous software will be ready in a matter of months, which is quite the claim given obstacles other companies have found in their path to deliver a completely reliable self-driving car. He said in the coming weeks staff will be testing the cars in San Francisco.
The advantage GM may have over some of its competitors is the ability to get the cars out faster. This could mean hundreds of thousands of the vehicles leaving the plant in Orion, Michigan, each year. The new car, Vogt told Recode, will “be built with automotive-grade compliance across the board and is capable of going down a high-volume assembly line in one of GM’s state of the art facilities that can crank out hundreds of thousands of cars a year, and when those vehicles roll off the line they’re fully capable of operating without a driver.”
Image: Cruise Automation/GM
Since you’re here …
… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.
