No steering wheel required?
General Motors’ self-driving Cruise AV could enter ride-sharing fleets by 2019
General Motors wants to add a fully autonomous car — one without a steering wheel or pedals — to its commercial ride-sharing fleets in 2019, and it’s now seeking approval from the U.S. government to do so.
GM calls the Cruise AV the “first production-ready vehicle designed from the start without a steering wheel, pedals or other unnecessary manual controls,” though the four-door largely seems to be a Chevrolet Bolt EV with a sensorand radar-clad exterior and a de-contented interior.
What was once the driver’s seat in the Bolt becomes the left front passenger seat in the Cruise AV; what was once the instrument panel gets blanked out instead. The Cruise AV will also be able to open its own doors for passengers who can’t, and will have accommodations built in for visually- or hearing impaired customers, Reuters reports.
Before the Cruise AV can enter widespread service, though, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will have to alter 16 safety rules, and GM’s said it petitioned the organization Jan. 11 to make those changes. Individual U.S. states will then also have to make similar alterations or grant the company waivers, though GM notes seven states have already altered their rules to be friendly to self-driving cars such as the Cruise AV.
The Cruise AV is powered by the fourth generation of GM’s selfdriving technologies, and relies on 21 radar systems, 16 cameras, and five lidar systems, which are essentially radars that use light instead of radio waves. The automaker still plans to limit the use of the car to pre-mapped urban areas.
It also plans to restrict the fleet to operation under a GM-owned ride-sharing service and the company has no plans yet to sell Cruise AVs to customers.
“GM wants to control its own self-driving fleet partly because of the tremendous revenue potential it sees in selling related services — from e-commerce to infotainment — to consumers riding in those vehicles,” Reuters reported, possibly netting “several hundred thousands of dollars” over a vehicle’s lifetime versus the, say, $30,000 it earns selling a car.
Ford, Uber, and Google’s Waymo have also been testing or plan to begin testing self-driving car prototypes.