GM President Wants More Public Streets Open For Autonomous Vehicle Testing
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General Motors and many other automobile manufacturers are bracing for the coming of the autonomous car. GM itself has made major investments into a changing automotive landscape, including autonomous vehicles in its purchase of Cruise Automation. But, in order for self-driving cars to truly become a reality, GM President Dan Ammann is calling for state and local governments to embrace the technology.
Automotive News reports Ammann specifically addressed the need for more public road testing of autonomous vehicles at the Economic Club of Chicago address during the Chicago Auto Show.
“To make autonomous vehicles the best they can be and the safest they can be, we really need to be testing on public streets,” he said. “It can be limited to a geo-fenced area, but it needs to be public streets in a real world environment.”
GM currently tests autonomous Chevrolet Bolt EVs in California, Arizona and Michigan on public roads. However, it’s not enough.
Ammann also reiterated the potential safety and quality of life benefits autonomous cars will bring, but they still need to experience many real world situations to learn road rules.
“At some point — it’s going to be sooner than people think — we will deploy our electric vehicles, still with a backup driver, into a ride-share fleet,” Ammann said. “We will use that fleet to accumulate all the data we need to convince ourselves and regulators that we are ready to go driverless.”
And, although investment into U.S. infrastructure is needed, Ammann stated GM will not wait for it.
“The approach that we’ve taken is, actually, we can’t wait for [infrastructure investments],” he said. “We need to make sure that the technology is able to work and be deployed in the current environment so that we’re not dependent upon some change or investment in infrastructure in order to do what we want to do here.”
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but customers want more affordable fun cars, like a cruze or Sonic SS
What will offer greater returns year over year? HP or autonomous cars?
Autonomous Cars if done correctly no doubt, Just as a young soon to be buyer, GM literally offers nothing below a 35k 1ss camaro that gets me excited about any brand, To capture customers you need stuff that gets people excited, sure buick sells okay now before their consumer base literally dies off. But GM needs to gain new, young, customers, they are losing out on repeat customers who will be loyal to other brands that can build a positive reputation with a customer,
Car companies will need to buy multi-million dollar insurance policies and demonstrate to communities how the vehicles are equipped with safeguards like automatic braking so the vehicle is programmed to never make contact with any object as well as more testing on an obstacle course.
He can want ’til he’s blue in the face. I think public skepticism and liabilities of this tech. will keep it at bay for a long time yet.