Not Self-Driving
The New York Times reporting G.M.’s Cruise Moved Fast in the Driverless Race. It Got Ugly.1:
Half of Cruise’s 400 cars were in San Francisco when the driverless operations were stopped. Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles, according to two people familiar with is operations. In other words, they frequently had to do something to remotely control a car after receiving a cellular signal that it was having problems.
After several accidents that led to fatalities, usually pedestrians, Cruise, General Motors self-driving subsidiary, suspended the operations of their 400 car fleet2. The New York Times explains that they were not even self-driving given the average distance before manual (remote) intervention being less than 8 km, and that on average 1.5 worker per car was required to self-drive.
The very short is that their tech isn’t ready. Nor are Waymo, Uber, Tesla, etc. At $588M per quarter for G.M. to run Cruise, it looks like a gigantic boondongle, and they were keen on lying about how it operated, maybe to look to be more advanced than they are.
Moving fast and breaking stuff, the Silicon Valley motto, causes losses of lives. And apparently this shocks no one. I wouldn’t bet on self-driving cars being a thing for a while, and Uber plan to replace drivers by robots might never see the light of day.