GM, Cruise Automation reveal driverless car
General Motors’ autonomous-vehicle team said it has created the world’s first mass producible car designed to operate without a human driver. Cruise Automation CEO Kyle Vogt said the electric vehicle, derived from the Chevrolet Bolt, “isn’t just a concept design — it has airbags, crumple zones, and comfortable seats.” In a post at Medium, he said its most significant attribute is that it is ready to be built at a GM assembly plant with the capacity to produce hundreds of thousands of vehicles annually. And it meets redundancy and safety requirements needed to operate without a human behind the wheel, Vogt said.
“If something on a vehicle fails while there is an attentive human in the driver’s seat, they can yank the wheel or stomp on the brake pedal to avoid an incident,” Vogt said. “This isn’t the case for a car with no driver, so we built backup systems. And in some cases we built backups for the backups — and backups for those systems, too.” All the while, Vogt said a production symphony had to be orchestrated at GM’s plant in Orion Township, Michigan, where the automaker assembles the regular, ready-for-consumption Bolt. The wiring harness alone in the newly revealed autonomous car has 4085 wires and 1066 connectors, Vogt said.
The self-driving concept unveiled this week is the company’s third autonomous-car generation in 14 months. The firstgen car was a standard Bolt retrofitted with Cruise’s existing autonomous technology. GM bought Cruise Automation for $1 billion in 2016. This year, Cruise and GM have been working toward developing an autonomous car that could be mass produced. They cut their teeth on what is considered a secondgeneration autonomous vehicle, which was revealed in June as a fleet of 130 self-driving Bolt EVs. The second-gen cars were meant to get suppliers in sync with the process of equipping necessary hardware on the assembly line, but Cruise rounded out the process with its own software and had to build some of its own sensors and controllers.
The second-gen cars have key elements for autonomous driving, but they lack the safety and redundancy systems needed for full driverless operation, Vogt said. Enter the third-gen car. “Safety and validation teams have carefully considered plausible failure modes for all critical systems and fed changes back into the design,” Vogt said. “Our newest self-driving car might look like a regular car on the outside, but the vehicle’s core system architecture more closely resembles that of a commercial airplane or spacecraft.”
GM and Cruise are designing the cars to emulate human abilities without making human mistakes. The automaker sees these autonomous vehicles as geared more toward companyowned fleets that could be used in ride-hailing programs in urban areas, for example. It’s less oriented toward consumers purchasing at dealerships, in part because the technology remains very expensive. Also, just look at it: Consumers willing to spend big rarely choose tiny cars sporting giant goiters on the roof, let alone models that haven’t even been graced with a name. Private ownership of computerdriven cars could be years or even decades away, though, so there’s time.
More immediately, the newly built, third-gen self-driving cars will join a fleet of Bolts that shuttle Cruise and GM employees around San Francisco, coordinated via a mobile app for ride hailing and scheduling. “For now, there will still be a human behind the wheel,” Vogt said of the cars, which should expand their utility, since no jurisdiction has fully resolved the legal issues surrounding pilotless vehicles.
GM is far from alone in this march toward autonomy, but its claim of being ready for mass production does distinguish it from its domestic competition. Ford says its goal is to deploy Level 4 autonomous vehicles — those with systems that can handle all operations in specific areas — by 2021. By the end of this year, Ford plans to have a fleet of 90 autonomous vehicles active on public roads. Fiat