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Remember the unsettling lack of steering wheel, break pedals, and so on? That means the Cruise’s not-car will require an exemption from the federal government’s motor vehicle safety standards. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration only grants 2,500 petitions a year. GM submitted a petition for permission to deploy a fully driverless Chevy Bolt in 2018, but it has yet to receive a response. And it will most likely need another exemption before the Origin is allowed to hit the road, too.
Interference with police and fire services
But unlike with other Big New Tech innovations I've seen in the past — anyone still have a 3D TV in their living room? I think the people behind the tech will figure out its possibilities, its limitations, and the places it does and doesn't make sense. On one of my trips, this happened on a particularly tight, winding San Francisco street. As my Waymo and I negotiated with each other, we ended up blocking multiple cars, including a minivan whose driver started honking at us in frustration.
Cruise Self-Driving Vehicles Return to Phoenix Roads - IoT World Today
Cruise Self-Driving Vehicles Return to Phoenix Roads.
Posted: Wed, 10 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
California allows robo-taxis to expand and emergency responders aren't happy
The company says the system isn’t fully autonomous and it monitors drivers to make sure they pay attention to the road. It operates on 97% of controlled access highways in the US and Canada, Ford says. The company said in documents posted by US safety regulators on Wednesday that with the updated software, Cruise vehicles will remain stationary should a similar incident occur in the future. Cruise is targeting non-engineering jobs in the layoffs, particularly those people who worked in the field, commercial operations and corporate staffing, according to the email. The company has also ended additional assignments of contingent workers who supported its driverless operations. Engineering, a category that makes up the bulk of the Cruise workforce, is largely being preserved, according to the content of the email and discussions with internal sources.
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Cruise's path to autonomous driving creates opportunities for increased mobility and independence. A company spokesperson would not comment on the NTSB report on Thursday, deferring to a previous statement saying that Ford is cooperating in the investigations. In Phoenix, where Waymo first launched consumer access, it has about the same number of cars but no waiting list. Sometimes it's just a sense that the tech we all depend on may be harming us in ways we don't understand and can't control. Waymo said it informed its test riders about the change Monday in an email, which someone also posted to Reddit. Seven days after the vote, a Cruise car collided with a fire truck, injuring a passenger.
You really are in a car, driving around the city, with no one in the driver's seat. Which is exactly how I felt after my last trip to San Francisco, when I took several rides in Waymo's robotaxis. In San Francisco, the futuristic nature of driverless vehicles has become a tourist attraction. Waymo said Tuesday that more than 50,000 people were on its waitlist to use the service. The company did not say how many users it would allow to fully use the app starting Wednesday.
Both companies have tested their vehicles without a safety driver behind the wheel and aspire to launch full-fledged commercial robot taxi services. Cruise, the self-driving car company affiliated with General Motors and Honda, is testing fully driverless cars, without a human safety driver behind the steering wheel, in San Francisco. The company is among the first to test its driverless vehicles in a dense, complex urban environment.
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Both NHTSA and the NTSB have investigated multiple previous crashes involving partially automated driving systems, most involving Tesla’s Autopilot. Meanwhile, Cruise is starting up again, but this time with humans in the driver's seat. Elon Musk has promised to unveil his robotaxi this summer, and while your doubt about anything Musk says is well warranted, you never know.
Safety
In December 2016, Google stunned the world when it revealed that it had put a blind man in one of its egg-shaped autonomous test vehicles and sent him out for a short ride around Austin, Texas. Google’s Firefly vehicle, audaciously designed by YooJung Ahn, is widely considered to be the first car tested publicly without a steering wheel or pedals. Both Cruise and Waymo have released studies saying their vehicles are involved in fewer crashes than human drivers. One Waymo study says it has an 85% reduction in injury-causing collisions and a Cruise study says it has a 74% reduction.
Incidents
Or maybe it's simply for people who would rather not interact with another human when they're in a taxi. Which is what David Margines, Waymo's director of product management, says is the service's chief appeal for customers right now. Like using it for food delivery — which is happening in Phoenix, via Uber Eats. Maybe it's for people who believe a robot is more reliable than a human driver — at least we know a Waymo won't watch TikTok while driving on the highway like a Lyft driver did when I was in their back seat a couple of years ago.
As 2022 wrapped up, CEO Kyle Vogt took to Twitter to post about the company's autonomous vehicles rolling onto the streets of San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix. Waymo's rival Cruise halted its service last fall after a slew of incidents, including a grisly one where a self-driving Cruise dragged a pedestrian who had been hit by a human-driven car. Opponents of autonomous taxi expansions, including the Teamsters, have vowed to slow down the growth of companies such as Waymo.
The pedestrian was pinned under one of the Cruise vehicle’s tires and was critically injured. Cruise will continue its work on driverless cars as a commercial product, says spokesperson Navideh Forghani. She added that the company's approach is "with safety as our north star." GM's spokesperson says it remains committed to Cruise "as they refocus on trust, accountability and transparency." An activist group called Safe Street Rebel has been cataloging the incidents, which now clock in at more than 500. The group figured out that if they put orange traffic cones on the hoods of driverless cars, they would render the vehicles immobile. So, they started going out at night to "cone" as many cars as possible as a form of protest.
With a broad smile, he reaches out and touches a button on the side, causing the doors to slide open with a little whoosh like something out of Star Wars. Learn how our data visualization tool shaped the future of autonomous driving. "Another excellent @Cruise ride. From a hotel to a grocery store and back to the hotel - fully autonomously. If you think the future is not here yet, you’re just yet to try it. Long autonomy. P.S. Tweeting this from an AV."
On the night of October 2, one of Cruise's driverless cars struck a pedestrian in San Francisco leaving her critically injured and fighting for her life. Cruise has not announced when or where it will resume driverless operations. The company’s main operations were historically based in San Francisco, but Cruise lost its permits to operate there following the accident. Cruise began expanding its paid service area in the Phoenix area in August 2023. Cruise executives said at the time they wanted to take a measured business approach that preserves cash and improves safety culture in an attempt to put GM’s troubled autonomous vehicle subsidiary on the right path. Even so, Cruise isn’t the first company to build and test a self-driving car without traditional controls.
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