GM’S driverless car bet faces long road ahead

t’s one of the biggest bets going in the world of cars.

Since May, General Motors Co and its Cruise self-driving car unit have landed $5 billion in investment commitments from Japan’s Softbank Group Corp and Honda Motor Co Ltd to develop a robot taxi service that could safely navigate the city streets of San Francisco by the end of next year — putting it ahead Alphabet Inc’s Waymo self-driving car unit, Uber and Lyft.

Those expectations are now hitting speed bumps, according to interviews with eight current and former GM and Cruise employees and executives. These sources say that some unexpected technical challenges — including the difficulty that Cruise cars have identifying whether objects are in motion — mean putting GM’S driverless cars on the road in a large scale way in 2019 is looking highly unlikely.

“Nothing is on schedule,” said one GM source, referring to certain mileage targets and other milestones the

DRIVERLESS CRUISE CARS STRUGGLE TO IDENTIFY WHETHER OBJECTS ON THE ROAD ARE MOVING OR NOT. THE RESULT IS THAT THE VEHICLES HESITATE AND STOP WHILE PASSING A ROW OF PARKED MOTORCYCLES

company has already missed.

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said last month the service will offer passengers “a primary form of transportation” most anywhere they want to go, and compete with Uber and Lyft.

Using driverless cars to carry farepaying customers would allow Cruise to recover investments in expensive technology and turn a profit more rapidly than trying to sell self-driving cars to the few individual customers who could afford them.

In addition, operating self-driving cars in a taxi service would allow Cruise and GM to tailor the service to the limitations of the technology until software and sensors are ready to enable autonomous vehicles that can go anywhere.

“Based on where we’re at and where we’ve been, we’re on track to hit that” 2019 goal, Vogt said.

Still, some close to the project acknowledge the length of time and money it will take to get the ride hailing service up and running.

“We know we aren’t commercially ready now,” said Michael Ronen, managing partner for Softbank Investment Advisers and the firm’s lead investor on the Cruise deal who will join Cruise’s board of directors. “I think now the question is who is going to be successful and how quickly.”

Driverless Cruise cars still struggle to identify whether objects on the road are moving or stationary, according to sources. The result is that the vehicles hesitate and stop while passing a row of parked motorcycles or bicycles, they said.

At times, the software has failed to recognise pedestrians, and has mistakenly seen phantom bicycles, causing the cars to brake erratically, sources say. And Cruise does not yet have a data-sharing collaboration with the San Francisco Fire Department, a necessary step to train the cars to respond to fire truck sirens, according to a fire department spokesman.

In addition, the open-source software robotics tools that Cruise used to develop the technology has delays that slow messages from the car’s sensors to the car’s brain.

Cruise’s Vogt said the next generation of hardware and software and sensors in the pipeline can help address these issues and will improve performance.

“Early in development I’m sure there were phases where we were putting systems together where they didn’t meet the requirements we needed for launch, and that’s part of the testing and development process,” he said.

“Safety is our measure for launching, and so we certainly will (resolve that) by the time we will release cars on the road without drivers,” he added.

GM’S drive to be seen as a leader in autonomous vehicle technology is critical at a time when the automaker’s shares are down more than 20 per cent for the year. The delivery of capital promised by Japan’s Softbank and Honda depends on Cruise achieving certain performance targets.

Cruise’s competitors face their own challenges, and some experts predict that a shakeout of rival efforts is inevitable. Uber, for example, had to overhaul its production timeline following a fatal crash with one of its self-driving SUVS. Though the autonomous vehicle program remains paused after the crash, a company official said Uber is making progress, building in safeguards to improve the overall functionality and safety of Uber’s self-driving cars.

“Everyone in the industry is becoming more and more nervous that they will waste billions of dollars,” said Klaus Froehlich, a board member at BMW and its head of research and development.