General Motors and its self-driving division Cruise Automation have announced that they’ve created the world’s first mass-producible fully-autonomous vehicle that doesn’t need a driver.
In a post published to Medium, Cruise Automation chief executive and founder Kyle Vogt announced that the company has produced its 3rd generation self-driving car which features all the safety requirements of a vehicle necessary to operate without a driver.
The self-driving car is an exceptionally advanced version of the Chevrolet Bolt and remains in prototype stage. However, Cruise Automation says it has all the hardware necessary ready to build fully-autonomous vehicles at a high-volume assembly plant that could build over 100,000 self-driving cars per year. Like Tesla, it ‘simply’ needs to perfect its self-driving software.
Before Cruise’s autonomous Bolt reaches the hands of consumers, the company will introduce a number of prototypes to the streets of San Francisco that can be used by Cruise employees. Initially, a human will be behind the wheel in case anything goes wrong.
In his Medium post, Vogt said the self-driving cars have “been designed to emulate human driving behavior but with the human mistakes omitted. They don’t drink and drive, they don’t text while driving, and they don’t get tired. It has taken the collective effort of over two thousand people to create this product, and we believe that together we’ve managed to create something that will one day drive significantly better than any individual.”
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