When an experimental project is made core to the company's traditional business, the experimental project is usually slowed down. The fewer dependencies between GM cars and Cruise, the better.
Vast majority of accidents are caused by drivers (or cyclers, pedestrians) who fail to safely engage in traffic. For the most part, cars don't kill people - people kill people (or, get themselves killed).
which is exactly why removing people out of the equation is the best way to solve the problem. even fully educated and hyper responsible person is not immune to judgement lapses, hallucinations, heart attacks, strokes, losses of consciousness and many more modes of failure.
what's worst - even if i'm 100% sure about myself, even if i take myself out of the equation - there are still thousands murderous humans driving around me.
Self-driving's problem isn't that it 'doesn't work in many use cases'. The problem is finding a single use case where today's L4 technology can actually be used given the technological, legal, PR and cost considerations.
Exactly - it's more about recognizing the shift that will happen if the technology can work and what that will mean.
GM seems to think it's important since they bought Cruise in the first place, but instead of seeing failure on this as an existential threat it seems more like a side project for them.
From the outside this seems like a bad strategy and will only succeed if it turns out self-driving is impossible (which seems unlikely).
Digital cameras were toys until suddenly they weren't and then Kodak died - even though they had invented the digital camera in the first place.
It's not enough to have the tech, you have to prioritize it in the business. Xerox PARC is another example of this type of failure.
Super Cruise, GM's Autopilot competitor, is planning to be fleet-wide by 2020[1]. But that is L2/L3 stuff, which is different than the L4 technology Cruise is focused on. You can't put L4 into GM's cars because it's not ready - it's probably dangerous and I'm doubtful it would be cost effective given the prices of sensors and the fact that you need to turn the car into a rolling datacenter.
While owned by General Motors, no. But with Softbank buying in, maybe GM is backing away from Cruise.
Is this another the Saudi Arabia sovereign wealth fund investment via Softbank? They seem to have become the world's largest source of dumb money.
Is there anybody, anywhere, yet who is deploying self-driving cars without "safety drivers" or insisting the driver remain active at the wheel? Cruise, no. Waymo, did for a while, then backed off. Volvo was supposed to be deploying by now but backed off. There are a few self-driving shuttle buses, but they're really slow, like 10mph, except when on dedicated pathways.
Companies that are claiming they will deploy in volume in the next two years are bullshitting. Nobody has Level 3 self driving working reliably in test yet. Let alone Level 4 or 5.
I wonder if they're underestimating its importance or if there might be internal fighting within GM.
This is another advantage Tesla has being all in towards the goal.