General Motors is ready to usher in a brave new world. A world where driver controls, the steering wheel and pedals, no longer exist and the car does all of the driving. GM President, Dan Ammann, recently spoke with CNBC to discuss GM’s latest Cruise AV self-driving car and explained the vehicle in greater detail.
Ammann touches on multiple topics, but foremost, he talks about safety as a number one priority. Per Ammann, the entire project stems from safety first. Cruise Automation has detailed the systems in greater detail, but GM’s self-driving car boasts numerous redundancies to ensure nothing can go awry, especially when there’s no choice for the passenger to retake control.
He also said GM isn’t worried about the current infrastructure, either. Instead, GM and Cruise engineers worked to develop it self-driving car systems with today’s infrastructure and felt waiting around for new investments wasn’t the best game to play. We still don’t know how self-driving cars operate in extreme weather conditions, however, and we’ve yet to see any prototype tackle snowy and icy conditions.
GM revealed its Cruise AV earlier this month without driver controls and also announced it submitted a safety petition to the Department of Transportation to deploy the car on public roads for commercial use in 2019. The first GM self-driving cars will find work in ride-hailing services, perhaps to Uber and Lyft drivers’ dismay.
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