It’s funny how things line up in the fabric of time at times. A few days ago, I wrote an article about Tesla having perhaps 29 supervised robotaxis in operation in Austin, Texas. It’s not clear what the exact number is, and it’s not clear exactly how many crashes these … [continued]
It’s hard to know what is going to come in the autonomous driving world in the next few years, or next decade. Waymo — spun out of Google — has been working on the topic for a couple of decades. I recall seeing a Google self-driving vehicle on the roads … [continued]
Cruise has slowly been expanding its network of robotaxis and their availability in certain markets. Though, it’s been a long time since the company entered new cities … until now. Cruise is now coming to Houston and Dallas. While Cruise vehicles will be fully self driving and operate even without … [continued]
One criticism of lidar-using robotaxi startups has long been the limited geographies in which they operate. Waymo started in a corner of Phoenix, and then a corner of San Francisco, and it isn’t much beyond those starting spots still! Cruise Automation, aka Cruise, started in a corner of San Francisco. … [continued]
I was on a cleantech editors roundtable yesterday, and one of the three things I postulated would be a hot topic in the remainder of the year was self-driving vehicles. Less than a day later, news broke that Waymo and GM’s Cruise have nearly received approval in the state of … [continued]
The news this month is that Cruise is beginning to roll out fully self-driving vehicles — with no drivers at all — on the streets of San Francisco.
More than a dozen companies have long been approved to test out self-driving cars in California. Now, they can also charge passengers if they launch a robotaxi service.
Here is the take of Dan Ammann after many years working on this and reaching the notable milestone of fully self-driving, unmanned electric cars on the streets of San Francisco.
I cover self-driving vehicles and robotaxis quite frequently as part of this job. In fact, I think we were using the term “robotaxi” before I saw it used by any other media outlet, and certainly before it had become an industry norm.
On Monday, General Motors announced its plans to build all-electric trucks and SUVs, along with the Cruise Origin, an electric autonomous ride sharing sharing vehicle, at the Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant. I spoke with GM leadership about the news. Some initial notes are below. More are coming in a future article.
