Most people who live in the city have probably seen these tests but there is no arguing that the Chevrolet Bolt EVs have really stood out. The EVs have an amazing and very effective autonomous sensor suite. The vehicles have been running their selected routes autonomously and they have just completed their test runs at night. They have also done quite a number of driverless miles. While there is still a long way to go until we have fully autonomous cars, there is no doubt that the driverless miles have provided outstanding insights for Cruise to improve the technology and make it more viable moving forward in the future.
Cruise is owned by General Motors and has been pioneering the development of self-driving cars. The recently released video is the third from Cruise. The new video focused on the nighttime ride. There is no doubt that driving at night has its own set of challenges and it is important for Cruise to make sure that the vehicles are adaptive to these challenges.
The fact that the video shows the autonomous cars covering a full hour of driving suggests that the progress made so far is very promising. In case you are interested in watching the video, don’t worry, you won’t have to sit through a whole hour. There are videos available online that are 4x faster and some even 10x faster. This basically means that you can go through the entire video in a number of minutes. The video will give you a continuous look of the miles covered by the autonomous car across the city of San Francisco.
The car covered much of the eastern part of the city. Cruise said that it started from SOMA and made its way across the downtown before crossing through Nob Hill. The videos that have been released so far show that Cruise has improved its technology and the night time driving, in particular, was a challenging barrier that had to be crossed. Based on the night time driving video that has been released, it appears that the autonomous self-driving cars are slowly but surely coming to life.
According to the files by GM, the company is looking to roll out about 300 self-driving cars across the US including in major cities and states such as San Francisco, Arizona, Scottsdale, and Detroit. There are already tests being undertaken in these areas. Cruise recently confirmed that it had deployed around 30 test vehicles in these cities. The idea of having a car that can drive itself is surely becoming a reality. The tests Cruise has done so far show that we aren’t that far away from self-driving cars and it will be interesting to see just how things will look once General Motors deploys the first batch of 300 cars.
