General Motors ride-sharing concept revealed, gets seats but no controls

KUALA LUMPUR: The US automaker, General Motors, has revealed a driverless prototype, aimed to be used as a ride-sharing vehicle, that neither gets a steering wheel nor pedals. Named as “Cruise Origin”, the autonomous car has been developed in collaboration with Honda, which along with GM have part ownership of the tech start-up, Cruise.

Cruise, a specialist company for producing autonomous vehicles, was established in 2013 in Silicon Valley, with GM taking a stake in 2016 and Honda in 2018 to stand tall against the competition and develop a technology that’s risky, involves hefty costs and has negligible market-ready vehicles as of now.

While talking with Reuters, the chief executive officer of Cruise, Dan Ammann said that the vehicle, with sliding doors on each side and measuring almost equal to an SUV, will be used for ride-sharing service. However, he did not reveal the launch date of the service that would take on the likes of Uber Technologies, Lyft, Rideshares, Didi and more.

For testing autonomous vehicles on real roads, brands need to take special permission from the authorities. Currently, only Alphabet’s Waymo has a permit to test vehicles without a driver in California. This is the reason why Cruise delayed its plans to launch a robo-taxi service from July 2019 to the end of the year. Unfortunately, the company is still looking to get a nod from the regulators.

Cruise’s employees in San Francisco commute through the company’s 180 self-driving cars with safety drivers. While the production of the new prototype will take time, Ammann said that they could use their test vehicles to start a commercial ride-hailing service once they get a permit. The Cruise Origin is a “fully engineered vehicle that’s on its way to production,” he said.

It would be interesting to see how does a driverless ride-sharing concept takes shape because there has been a lot of talks about self-driving vehicles not ready for public roads due to recent accidents that were reported. Consumers are still looking for solid reasons and use-cases to accept the technology fully.

Further, Ammann told reporters, “We’re obviously still working on something that’s never been done before. So the timelines given aren’t completely certain, but we’re moving really quickly.”

GM has said that Cruise, which works as a part of GM’s Autonomous Vehicle Development Team, is an independent autonomous vehicle manufacturing company based in San Fransisco and it will continue to work independently in future as well.

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