No release date or price or anything? I honestly don't even know what this is. Is it for the city or for the individual? What are its capabilities? I sure would love ANY concrete details. This is all just tech marketing speak, same old bullshit.
Here are the CA DMV's autonomous vehicle accident reports for 2019.[1] Cruise has a lot of them. Mostly being rear-ended by a human-driven car. A surprisingly large number are with the vehicle being driven manually, or right after the human driver took over. True driverless still seems a long way off given those results.
I've seen Cruise cars in SF, most recently making a left turn off Union St in manual mode.
GM's first try at self-driving, Firebird III in 1958, was far cooler than this mini-bus thing.
The mini-bus area seems a good place to start with self-driving. I was once thinking airport parking lot shuttles. Controlled environment, low speed - that could work. But the financial numbers don't work out. You get rid of the driver cost, but you add sizable engineering cost and vehicle cost, and you don't sell many vehicles that way. Local Motors and some other startups have been struggling quietly in that space for years now. Local Motors' Olli has three live installations, with about six vehicles total, all very recent. A college campus, a casino area, and a dedicated track at an industrial park are the public installations. Demos, basically. The thing is so slow that walking might be faster, and any bicycle or electric scooter would be much faster. Not fast enough to get people from Economy Parking to the terminal.
Navya, from France, seems to be further along. They provided the self-driving shuttles for the Las Vegas strip. They have a number of live mini-bus installations in Europe. They've announced an autonomous cab, but it is not deployed yet.
This is still something that can only be done if someone is willing to finance a money-loser. However, this is perhaps the best time in history for that.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton...
https://medium.com/cruise/the-disengagement-myth-1b5cbdf8e23...
The images of the "Origin" are renders. Not all vehicles. They have plenty of data and footage from their actual self-driving cars.
Could that also be because the driver took over to try to avert the imminent collision?
This is so disingenuous. Every car has a human safety driver in it that they failed to mention.