[Steverino]

Cruise and parent company General Motors showed off the Generation 3 on Monday, built in GM's Orion assembly plant in Michigan. The vehicle comes with fully redundant systems, which means if one, say, computer that crunches data and determines how the car will drive dies, another stands ready to back it up—and keep human occupants safe from harm.



A truly driverless car won’t have a person up front, which means it must protect itself from mishaps. That’s the significance of the Generation 3 vehicle's redundant mechanical systems, steering systems, braking systems, sensors systems, and computer systems.

Engineers had to modify 40 percent of the Bolt's parts to accommodate autonomous driving. It should still maintain the Bolt's impressive range, though: 238 miles on one charge.

GM won't commit to a deadline, but once its vehicles are fully ready, don't expect to find them on showroom floors. The technology will be so expensive that the company will deploy them in fleets, picking up passengers like taxis. Or Lyfts.

https://www.wired.com/story/gm-cruise-generation-3-self-driving-car/

https://medium.com/kylevogt/how-we-built-the-first-real-self-driving-car-really-bd17b0dbda55

 

[bro1999]

First to the market with a 200+ mile, <$40k BEV with the Bolt, and now the first produce a mass-production autonomous vehicle. GM needs to stop stealing poor Tesla's thunder!

 

[volt11]

Just adding ACC to the consumer Bolt would be a start. It's standard in Prius Prime. What they really need is SuperCruise, and preferably in a nicer Buick version, to compete with the Model 3. Maybe even to compete with the new Leaf.

 

[obermd]

What happened to the Generation 2 Bolt?

 

[jbakerjonathan]

Has anyone discovered/uncovered how the legal responsibilities in an accident will be handled? Will the owner of the vehicle be held responsible? GM? The design engineers? Inquiring minds desperately want to know! 8^)

 

[rhodomel]

I can see savings of at least $36,000 per car per year on driver's salary alone. No strikes, no overtime pay. These Bolts can self-recharge and can self-park. That is the value that would be saved by company fleet owners that uses drivers, for example Lyft or shuttling people from hotels to airports. So the premium over the life of the car would be really high because of the perceived tremendous savings.

 

[Upper5Percent]

If this were Tesla, they'd be selling these cars to the public, rather than using them an expensive test beds as GM is doing...

 

[Upper5Percent]

Has anyone discovered/uncovered how the legal responsibilities in an accident will be handled? Will the owner of the vehicle be held responsible? GM? The design engineers? Inquiring minds desperately want to know! 8^)

Don't worry, lawyers will sue everyone...

 

[viking79]

If this were Tesla, they'd be selling these cars to the public, rather than using them an expensive test beds as GM is doing...

These cars are clearly designed for fleet sales. My guess is they start making deals with fleet operators in the coming year, if they haven't already.

 

[hvacman]

Tesla implies it has "Level 5" (full autonomous) capable hardware installed in all Model 3's - standard! No weird bumps, no costly custom hardware. Just add future software.

https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

Reading the specs for GM's Gen 3 Autonomous Bolts, though, and comparing them to Tesla's, the Bolts have a whole other level of hardware reliability - full redundancy, etc. etc. Which auto-piloted vehicle would you want to trust your and your family's life to at 60 mph?

 

[rhodomel]

It's Tesla's fault for lacking safeguards against improper use, the NTSB says:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/business/self-driving-cars.html

 

[hellsop]

It's Tesla's fault for lacking safeguards against improper use, the NTSB says:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/business/self-driving-cars.html

Go listen to the thing. The NYT is much harder on Tesla than the board was. NTSB was very much "Here are some gaps that we see. Are there technical solutions to these?" and the guy that seemed to be representing Tesla responded with "We have these options available, and we believe that combining them in this other way will meet those gaps".

But I certainly agree that we'll probably see the driving aids get limited when not on ramp-restricted highways, and nobody will be able to set both the driving aids AND a cruise speed above the speed limit Real Soon Now.

 

[Steverino]

What happened to the Generation 2 Bolt?

The article is about the self driving generation 3, not the Bolt generation 3.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Tesla implies it has "Level 5" (full autonomous) capable hardware installed in all Model 3's - standard! No weird bumps, no costly custom hardware. Just add future software.

https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

Reading the specs for GM's Gen 3 Autonomous Bolts, though, and comparing them to Tesla's, the Bolts have a whole other level of hardware reliability - full redundancy, etc. etc. Which auto-piloted vehicle would you want to trust your and your family's life to at 60 mph?

Since the GM system is still an unpriced demo system that requires occasional human intervention, and since the Tesla system is just driver assistance (and in most cases hasn't even matched Autopilot 1 level yet), the answer is neither.

 

[Loboc]

Kyle Vogt (Cruise Automation) says they built the first real self-driving car

He is claiming that the car is third-generation built loosely on Bolt architecture and highly mass-producible.

"Today, we’re actually on our 3rd vehicle generation in 14 months. If we followed typical OEM development cycles this would have taken 6 years."

"Our newest self-driving car might look like a regular car on the outside, but the vehicle’s core system architecture more closely resembles that of a commercial airplane or spacecraft. It’s a complex and time consuming process to design cars this way, but it’s the responsible thing to do."

https://medium.com/kylevogt/how-we-built-the-first-real-self-driving-car-really-bd17b0dbda55