This week saw automotive giant General Motors giving reporters rides in cars from its self-driving unit, Cruise Automation on the streets of San Francisco.
A self-driving Chevrolet Bolt vehicle, kitted out with the company’s latest autonomous systems slowly drove itself more than two miles through crowded San Francisco roads, but double-parked cars and orange traffic cones tripped up the automation on several occaisions before a taco truck stumped the vehicle completely, forcing the human safety driver to take over and keep the show on the road.
“Our mission is to bring this technology to commercial deployment at scale, with safety, as soon as we humanly can do that,” GM President Dan Ammann told reporters. He repeated Chief Executive Mary Barra’s promise in October that GM would roll out self-driving cars within “quarters, not years.”
During a roughly 15-minute ride in a busy area of San Francisco over a 2.2 mile trip, the Cruise-enhanced electric Bolt carrying a Reuters journalist encountered 117 people, 4 bikes and 129 cars, according to the car’s sensors.
The car, never moving more than 20 miles per hour, navigated urban traffic, a tram line, construction zones, pedestrians crossing streets and many double-parked vehicles. Urban environments are as much as 46 times more complex than suburban areas, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said.
As with all automation systems, the Bolt reacted more conservatively than a human driver, for example slowing to a near stop after sensing a bike approaching in the opposite lane.
“Looking for a clear path” screens facing the driver and passengers read several times during the trip, when the car stopped next to some traffic cones or behind double-parked vehicles. After pauses, it restarted and passed the obstacles by itself.
A taco truck was too much, though. The Bolt’s human backup driver disengaged the system and took the wheel after the car waited for more than a minute behind the truck where construction workers ordered lunch.
Vogt said those issues would improve over time and that the winner of the self-driving car race would be the one that first launches at “massive scale” rather than just being the first to market a model.
