With General Motors CEO Mary Barra’s unrelenting support for autonomous vehicles, she recently announced her hopes for GM to start selling personal autonomous vehicles by 2030. She hopes to leverage the company’s self-driving subsidiary, Cruise, which she expects to have evolved into the perfect technology within the next decade. Cruise is a self-driving startup that General Motors holds a controlling interest in. The startup is working on autonomous vehicles that will operate like the regular vehicles that we have now. It is testing the technology on public roads in San Francisco while also signing a deal to launch a robotaxi service in Dubai in 2023.
Cruise is still in the testing stages for its self+driving technology. As it waits for the best time to launch, General Motors is working to improve its hands-free driver assistance system Super Cruise to integrate it into more of its vehicle models. Super Cruise uses high-precision GPS, radar sensors, cameras, lidar map data and a driver attention system to keep the person behind the wheel focused on the road. Super Cruise does not need its users to have their hands on the wheel, unlike Tesla’s Autopilot assistance system, but they have to keep their eyes on the road ahead.
General Motors is keeping Super Cruise’s development to its chest and taking its time to ramp up the technology in terms of vehicle integration and capability. Mary Barra says General Motors’ timeline is to roll out Super Cruise in up to 22 vehicle models by 2023. Super Cruise was launched in 2017 in only one Cadillac model – the CT6 sedan and drivers could only use it on divided highways. By 2019, the company announced its plans to include more vehicle models and now the project is being ramped up to make Super Cruise available on city streets instead of only highways.
“The plan is to get Cruise to full autonomy, but in Super Cruise, we are working on adding more features to achieve hands-free transportation in 95% of driving scenarios,” Mary Barra, GM CEO, says. She also noted that the vehicle intelligence platform (VIP) that connects the company’s proprietary vehicle system to a secure and high-speed network lends further credence to the possibility of Super Cruise
With 5.5 terabytes of data processing power per hour, VIP can handle all the data loads of its driver assistance systems. Barra is optimistic that the technology will be of immense benefit to customers. She also foresees VIP being in seven vehicles and 38 global vehicle models by the end of 2023. Her ultimate goal is to see Cruise’s self-driving technology being used in personal autonomous vehicles.
General Motors reported $32,47 billion in the first quarter of 2021, slightly below the $33.7 billion it reported for the same period last year. The CEO’s projections for this technology mean progress for the automobile industry. It’s also going to improve upon the offerings that Tesla already gives its customers in its autonomy self-driving feature
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