dChan
Anonymous ID: d5506f Feb. 4, 2019, 7:53 p.m. No.5033010   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>3044

In 2019, We’ll Have Taxis Without Drivers—or Steering Wheels

Waymo and GM Cruise will unveil them in limited areas, but a U.S. national rollout will need new road regulations

 

A coming milestone in the automobile world is the widespread rollout of Level 4 autonomy, where the car drives itself without supervision. Waymo, the company spun out of Google’s self-driving car research, said it would start a commercial Level 4 taxi service by late 2018, although that hadn’t happened as of press time. And GM Cruise, in San Francisco, is committed to do the same in 2019, using a Chevrolet Bolt that has neither a steering wheel nor pedals.

 

These cars wouldn’t work in all conditions and regions—that’s why they’re on rung 4 and not rung 5 of the autonomy ladder. But within some limited operational domain, they’ll have the look and feel of a fully robotized car. The question is how constrained that domain will be.

 

Neither Waymo—a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company—nor GM Cruise agreed to speak for the record. But it’s possible to judge their progress indirectly. In December Waymo turned its pilot ride-hailing project near Phoenix into a limited commercial service by charging select participants a fee. But it’s clearly looking at a bigger target or it wouldn’t have contracted to buy 20,000 all-electric Jaguar I-Pace SUVs over the next two years. GM Cruise says it will offer a commercial Level 4 ride service in 2019, operating within particular boundaries “at all times of day and night, and in light-to-moderate inclement weather.” It appears that the service will be available first in San Francisco.

 

https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/self-driving/in-2019-well-have-taxis-without-driversor-steering-wheels