GM to start autonomous vehicle manufacturing and testing in Michigan
16 December 2016
On the heels of the signing of the SAVE Act legislation to support autonomous vehicle testing and deployment in Michigan (earlier post), General Motors will immediately begin testing autonomous vehicles on public roads. GM also announced it will produce the next generation of its autonomous test vehicles at its Orion Township assembly plant beginning in early 2017.
Testing is already underway on GM’s Technical Center campus in Warren, Michigan, and with the passage of the SAVE Act legislation will now expand to public roads on the facility’s outskirts. Within the next few months, testing will expand to metro Detroit, which will become GM’s main location for development of autonomous technology in winter climates.
Workers at the Orion Township assembly plant will build test fleet Bolt EVs equipped with fully autonomous technology. The plant currently manufactures the Chevrolet Bolt EV and Sonic. The new equipment will include LiDAR, cameras, sensors and other hardware designed to ensure system safety, leveraging GM’s proven manufacturing quality standards.
The test fleet vehicles will be used by GM engineers for continued testing and validation of GM’s autonomous technology already underway on public roads in San Francisco and Scottsdale, Arizona, as well as part of the Michigan testing fleet.
Since the beginning of 2016, GM has taken significant steps in its development of autonomous vehicle technology.
In January, the company announced the formation of a dedicated autonomous vehicle engineering team and a $500-million investment in Lyft to develop an integrated network of on-demand autonomous vehicles in the US. In March, the company announced the acquisition of Cruise Automation to provide deep software talent and rapid development expertise to help speed development.
In June, GM began testing autonomous Chevrolet Bolt EVs on the public roads in San Francisco and Scottsdale. The company has more than 40 autonomous vehicles testing in the two cities.
Frankly, the way that everybody but Tesla approaches the development of self-driving cars is not going to work. They all have less than 500 cars on the road with fully self-driving capable hardware and 95% of them have less than 50 cars on the road. Tesla already has over 25,000 cars on the road with fully self driving hardware and by dec 2017 they will have over 150,000 self driving capable cars on the road and by dec 2018 over 500,000 self-driving cars on the road.
You need hundreds of thousands of cars on the road to iron out all the freak cases in the software that causes accidents. Tesla can do it safely because they can run their unfinished software in shadow mode and get all the real world info they need to see where the car would have failed had the software been in control. Until we see other automakers do like Tesla and install fully self-driving hardware on a production car that sells in hundreds of thousands per year they are not going to be able to develop the self driving software. It is really hard to do the code and without massive real world data to help the programmers focus on important issues it will be impossible IMO. Tesla is many years ahead on self driving cars as a result. The auto world will tremble when Tesla boot a fully functional Tesla Network in 2018 with over 500,000 self driving taxis each with a potential to drive 100,000 miles per year earning 100,000 USD per year. That is 50 billion USD worth of potential taxi fees in one year. Halleluiah!
Posted by: Account Deleted | 16 December 2016 at 01:31 AM
I may add that GM should install driverless hardware (level 5) to all Bolts and Volts that they make. Just like Tesla does for Model S and X. Bolt and Volt are made in 70,000 units combined per year and that would generate enough real world data to have a chance to actually make the driverless software function before 2020 for GM. Using a few hundred rigged cars it not going anywhere like Google’s 10 years project has shown.
Posted by: Account Deleted | 16 December 2016 at 01:42 AM