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On't bother to look for the steering wheel or pedals in the new autonomous shuttle vehicle unveiled by Cruise, the startup owned by General Motors. Founded in 2013, Cruise makes self-driving cars that have the potential to save millions of lives, reshape our cities, give people more spare time, and restore freedom of movement for many. NHTSA opened an investigation on 16 October into four reports that Cruise vehicles may not exercise proper caution around pedestrians. The complaints involved vehicles operating autonomously and “encroaching on pedestrians present in or entering roadways, including pedestrian crosswalks in the proximity of the intended travel path of the vehicles”, the agency said. In the crash, another vehicle with a person behind the wheel struck a pedestrian, sending the person into the path of a Cruise autonomous vehicle. But it then pulled to the right to get out of traffic, pulling the person about 20ft (six meters) forward.
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And they say Cruise isn’t doing enough to keep them safe during these public health crises. Cruise was the fifth company to receive a driverless permit from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, the others being Waymo, Nuro, Zoox, and AutoX. Currently, 60 companies have an active permit to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver in California. While the department of motor vehicles did not elaborate on specific reasons for its suspension of Cruise’s license, the agency accused Cruise of misrepresenting safety information about the autonomous technology in its vehicles. The revocation followed a series of incidents that heightened concerns about the hazards and inconveniences caused by Cruise’s robotaxis. Cruise says in documents posted by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that it already has updated software in test vehicles that are being supervised by human safety drivers.
Cruise Says Hostility to Regulators Led to Grounding of Its Autonomous Cars - The New York Times
Cruise Says Hostility to Regulators Led to Grounding of Its Autonomous Cars.
Posted: Thu, 25 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
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Cruise will resume manual driving of its autonomous vehicles to create maps and gather road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix, the company said Tuesday. The GM subsidiary already had a presence in Phoenix before it pulled its entire U.S.-based fleet last year following an incident in San Francisco that left a pedestrian stuck under and dragged by a Cruise robotaxi. Even so, Cruise isn’t the first company to build and test a self-driving car without traditional controls.
GM-backed Cruise targets 1 million self-driving vehicles by 2030
On Thursday, Rajat Basu, chief engineer for the Origin program, validated those theories. Test scenarios also include simulating the way other road users react to the AV. Cruise’s system for this is called non-player character (NPC) AI, which is usually a video game term, but in this context, refers to all of the cars and pedestrians in a scene that represent complex multi-agent behaviors. Cruise is relying on simulations not only to prove out its safety case, but also to scale to new cities without having to perform millions of miles of tests in them first. Cruise, with Honda’s help, designed the interior of the vehicle primarily for shared rides. The screens, one on either side, will display an itinerary for picking up and dropping off each passenger, so riders know what to expect.
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Most of the autonomous cars on the road today have drivers who can take control in an emergency, and the Cruise Origin may be the first to hit the roads without that capability. In documents filed with NHTSA, Cruise said its automated driving system was designed in some cases to pull over and out of traffic to minimize safety risks and disruption after a crash, with the response dependent on the characteristics of the crash. But in certain circumstances such as a pedestrian positioned on the ground in the vehicle’s path, pulling over is not the desired response. 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, a majority-owned subsidiary of General Motors, will acquire self-driving startup Voyage in another major autonomous vehicle merger. The announcement came less than a week after news first surfaced that the two companies were in talks about an acquisition. Jacobson declined to disclose whether GM could bring Cruise into the automaker, which has its own autonomous vehicle unit and recently appointed Anantha Kancherla from Meta Platforms to the newly created position of vice president of advanced driver-assistance systems. Windsor said he does not expect any major deployment of autonomous vehicles before 2028.
Cruise recalls all self-driving cars after grisly accident and California ban
Maybe a human wouldn’t do it exactly that way, it becomes a national headline,” he said. But to date, autonomous vehicles are largely limited to small-scale tests in limited areas, with former Google car division Waymo seen as one of the leading firms. The October incident wasn’t the first time Cruise’s technology has caused problems. Even as Cruise expanded to new cities in the second half of 2023, its robotaxis were routinely malfunctioning in cities like San Francisco and Austin, disrupting the flow of traffic, public transit and first responders.
GM's Cruise is putting robotaxis back on the road — with drivers - Quartz
GM's Cruise is putting robotaxis back on the road — with drivers.
Posted: Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Pedestrian injuries
It tried to sugarcoat the disappointing news by announcing a plan to dramatically increase the number of its test vehicles on the road in San Francisco. Now Mr. Vogt’s driverless car company faces its own safety concerns as he contends with angry regulators, anxious employees, and skepticism about his management and the viability of a business that he has often said will save lives while generating billions of dollars. GM acquired Cruise in 2016 amid a race by automakers to get into autonomous vehicles which can help reshape urban environments by allowing for shared rides without owning a car. General Motors’ Cruise autonomous vehicle unit is recalling all 950 of its cars to update software after one of them dragged a pedestrian to the side of a San Francisco street in early October and a subsequent ban by California regulators. Safety is the defining principle for everything we do and will guide our progress through this process.
The company says it will also work on improved engagement with first responders to facilitate trainings in each precinct it plans to operate in. Prior to that incident, Cruise had been announcing launches in new cities — including Dallas, Houston and Miami — at a startling pace. Critics accused the company of expanding too fast and cutting corners on safety. The relaunch comes after the company ceased operations weeks after an Oct. 2 accident in which a pedestrian in San Francisco was dragged 20 feet by a Cruise robotaxi after being struck by a separate vehicle. During GM’s investor day in October, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann outlined the company’s plan to invest heavily into the compute power of the Origin in order to decrease costs by 90% over the next four generations so it can scale profitably. At the time, Ammann mentioned Cruise’s intention to manufacture custom silicon in-house to cut costs, but didn’t admit outright using that silicon to build a chip — but TechCrunch had its theories.
Problems at Cruise could slow the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles that carry passengers without human drivers on board. It also could bring stronger federal regulation of the vehicles, which are carrying passengers in more cities nationwide. During our operational pause over the last few months, Cruise maintained ongoing and extensive testing in complex, dynamic simulated environments and on closed courses, enabling continuous retraining and improvement. Now, we are building on that work to create high-quality semantic maps and gather road information to ensure future operations meet elevated safety and performance targets. And because no two cities are the same, we plan to conduct this manual and supervised driving in multiple cities - starting with Phoenix - to expose our AVs to a diverse set of driving environments and conditions as we prepare for future driverless service.
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. That means the Cruise’s not-car will require an exemption from the federal government’s motor vehicle safety standards.
Over the past several weeks we have communicated directly with officials, first responders, and community leaders in cities we’ve previously operated in to share updates on our path forward. We are committed to safely deploying our technology in close collaboration with officials and communities at every step. General Motors’ Cruise is redeploying robotaxis in Phoenix after nearly five months of paused operations, the company said in a blog post. But it won’t have to remap cities to track changes to the environment that inevitably happen, like lane changes or street closures.
Prior to the accident, Cruise was planning an aggressive expansion of robotaxis outside its home market where the majority of its vehicles operated. "We have not yet made a commitment to where or when we will start supervised or driverless operations," a spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. “The amount of development work to get from nothing to the level of performance to operate without a driver was enormous,” says Vogt. Learn the basics of how a Cruise car navigates city streets safely and efficiently. During a GM investor event Wednesday, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann showed a graphic of the division's "exponential Cruise fleet ramp." The graph pointed to Cruise scaling its operations 1 million or more vehicles by the end of the decade. GM continues to operate a military defense unit and fuel cell business that have both recently announced new contracts or partnerships.
Next, we’ll validate our AV’s end-to-end performance against our rigorous safety and AV performance requirements through supervised autonomous driving on public roads, in addition to the ongoing simulation and closed course driving we do. During this phase, the Cruise vehicles will drive themselves and a safety driver is present behind the wheel to monitor and take over if needed. The company last week was granted the fifth of six permits needed to commercialize a self-driving ride-hailing fleet in the state. Google's Waymo also was granted a similar permit, but it requires the vehicles to have back-up safety drivers. "In October 2023, we paused operations of our fleet to focus on rebuilding trust with regulators and the communities we serve, and to redesign our approach to safety," Cruise said in a blog post. "We've made significant progress, guided by new company leadership, recommendations from third-party experts, and a focus on a close partnership with the communities in which our vehicles operate. We are committed to this improvement as a continuous effort."
Founded in 2013 in San Francisco, US, Cruise fulfils CEO Kyle Vogt’s childhood dream of making self-driving cars a reality. Co-founded by Chief Product Officer Dan Kan, the company was acquired by General Motors in 2016 to bring more than a century of experience in designing and manufacturing vehicles to the autonomous vehicle (AV) effort. Critics say the cars get easily confused by common situations on city streets. Some activists have taken to placing orange cones on the hoods of Cruise’s vehicles in order to disable them as a form of protest.
There is no obvious front to the vehicle, no hood, no driver or passenger side windows, no side-view mirrors. Cruise has hired a law firm to investigate how it responded to regulators, as its cars sit idle and questions grow about its C.E.O.’s expansion plans. Sensors can see 360 degrees, hundreds of feet ahead, and around that double-parked car. Cruise cars make sense of this data in a split second, tracking every important object in view.
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