General Motors Is About to Do Something Big with Self-Driving Cars

There will also be a press event held on November 28th in San Fancisco. GM will reveal their Generation 4 autonomous Bolts, which will be the first iteration to be designed as public passenger carrying robotaxis, rather than just as testing vehicles. If these things go the way they go, members of the press will have a chance to ride around in them.

Reuters reported in the spring that GM intended to have 'thousands' of robotaxis on the road by the end of 2018. Regulation approving fully driverless vehicles on California roads is scheduled to be passed next June. In Phoenix Cruise can start running their vehicles whenever they feel ready.

Mary Barra promised that Driverless cars will be deployed in "Quarter not Years". I don't think it's an empty promise, Cruise Automation is doing very well. It's really only Waymo and Cruise who are worth paying attention to at the moment. Cruise was founded in 2013, before the self driving car hype and investment frenzy took off, and as such they were able to get a great deal on top talent. They have a very good team.

Uber, Baidu, and Intel/Mobileye have well capitalized, scaled up autonomous driving operations but I don't think any of them can yet drive 10 miles in Urban traffic without needing human intervention. Cruise is off and running, that first 10 miles in challenging traffic is the hardest, and Cruise passed that benchmark a while back.

Fricken's comment is better than the article itself. The Motley Fool is not a place you want to go for credible business/investing journalism

> "GM is expected to make a major announcement next week"

Ah, an announcement of an announcement, the quintessence of offtopicness.

On HN we prefer to wait until a thing actually exists. If that's too high a bar we can at least wait until it's actually announced.