U.S. to decide soon on GM’s request to deploy cars without steering wheels::U.S. regulators will soon decide on a petition filed by General Motors’ Cruise self-driving technology unit seeking permission to deploy up to 2,500 self-driving vehicles annually without human controls, a top auto safety official said on Wednesday.
I wonder if this came from engineering or the marketing department.
I’m getting “Let’s do this, and if it fails (which it will), it’ll look like we’re really confident in our self-drive and are a challenger in the market” vibes.
Even if you have excellent self-drive, there is no logical reason not to have a backup steering wheel just to intervene in case. Tbh, I had no idea they were even in the self-drive market which may be their true problem. No one really knows.
I remember being shocked that my third generation smart phone didn’t have a pull out keyboard. Or that headphone jacks became a casualty. I think in the long run this is the goal.
Next step, you can’t use the car you paid for without a subscription for the self driving service. Want to drive yourself instead to save money? Nope, you bought a car without a steering wheel.
if there’s no one in the driver’s seat to pay attention, then why would you have a wheel to intervene “just in case”?
Well you know now! So it worked.
Funny thing about ai is there isn’t really a moat. Once an idea is out there it’s easy to catch up, so don’t be surprised to see the big players ahead now get caught up by competitors very quickly.
Self driving is a lot more than just AI though. Our current AI gets really smart really quickly, but fails way too often to be used in critical roles like driving, which is why most of the code in these self driving cars isn’t actually AI. They use it to predict the path of other cars, decipher data, and make high level decisions, but the actual control of the car (steering, brakes, etc) is all traditional programming. Waymo even talked about how they used to have more AI, and removed some in favor of traditional logic
