General Motors (GM) is betting you will and they have plans to market its revolutionary all-electric and driverless car in the near future. Autonomous cars are the future and there’s no doubting that but it will fare very well with the younger generation of drivers and not the seasoned drivers like us who need to be in control…..one way or another.
Car and tech companies are noticing the potential of this market in the coming years and this is the reason why you see that there is a lot of investment that has gone into making technologies that will make driving a car obsolete and unnecessary.
This is the Cruise AV (Autonomous Vehicle) and it is the completely driverless version of the Chevrolet Bolt EV, a front-engine; 5-door all-electric subcompact hatchback marketed by GM and produced starting in October 2016. GM describes Cruise AV as “the first production-ready vehicle built from the start to operate safely on its own, with no driver, steering wheel, pedals or manual controls.”
Unlike the Bolt, Cruise AV has no controls whatsoever, not even buttons. Cruise AV was designed to treat you as a passenger, no matter where you sit.
GM is currently testing its autonomous cars in Phoenix and in San Francisco. GM’s tests have shown that San Francisco presents many more challenges for self-driving vehicles. “While we also test vehicles in Phoenix, our San Francisco vehicles predict an average of 32 times as many possible interactions as those in Phoenix. Thus, San Francisco challenges our self-driving system more because, as the number of objects increase, there are exponentially more possible interactions with objects that the self- driving system must consider. For example, GM’s self-driving Chevy Bolts encounter 270 emergency vehicles for every 1,000 miles driven in San Francisco, compared to just 6 in Phoenix.”
We are not ready for this and will stick to our steering wheel.
