Mexican Media Brands
GM Cruise Delays Autonomous Taxi Service
GM Cruise LLC says its driverless taxis won’t be ready to deploy for paying customers this year after all.
Share
GM Cruise LLC says its driverless taxis won’t be ready to deploy for paying customers this year after all.
CEO Dan Ammann tells Bloomberg News that verifying the safety of the cars is taking longer than expected. He now says the General Motors Co. affiliate will debut its taxis for paying customers in San Francisco sometime in 2020.
Referring to a familiar adage in Silicon Valley, Ammann cautions that “the mindset of ‘move fast and break things’ certainly doesn’t cut it” for autonomous vehicles.
Cruise’s first robotic taxis will be modified versions of GM’s Bolt electric car. Ammann says GM, Cruise and Honda are working on a taxi-specific vehicle for future self-driving services.
Bloomberg notes that Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo driverless-car affiliate also missed its self-declared goal of introducing a commercial driverless ride-hailing service in 2018. The unit has been testing 500 self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans in Phoenix for three years, using volunteer test families.
Waymo did begin accepting paying customers for a few of its robotic shuttles—but with a backup driver on board—at the end of last year.
RELATED CONTENT
-
Jeeps Modified for Moab
On Easter morning in Moab, Utah, when the population of that exceedingly-hard-to-get-to town in one of the most beautiful settings on Earth has more than doubled, some people won’t be hunting for Easter eggs, but will be trying to get a good look at one of the vehicles six that Jeep has prepared for real-life, fast-feedback from the assembled at the annual Easter Jeep Safari.
-
GM Develops a New Electrical Platform
GM engineers create a better electrical architecture that can handle the ever-increasing needs of vehicle systems
-
On Electric Pickups, Flying Taxis, and Auto Industry Transformation
Ford goes for vertical integration, DENSO and Honeywell take to the skies, how suppliers feel about their customers, how vehicle customers feel about shopping, and insights from a software exec
