The bet of the car without driver of GM faces a long way ahead

The bet of the car without driver of GM faces a long way ahead https://www.eresviral.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/La-apuesta-del-auto-sin-conductor-de-GM-se-enfrenta-a-un-largo-camino-por-delante

The bet of the car without driver of GM faces a long way ahead







SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - It's one of the biggest bets in the world of cars. 











A self-driving cruise car, owned by General Motors Corp, is seen outside the company's headquarters in San Francisco, where it conducts most of its tests, in California, USA. UU., September 26, 2018. REUTERS / Heather Somerville





Since May, General Motors Co (GM.N) and its Cruise automatic driving unit have secured $ 5 billion in investment commitments from SoftBank Group Corp of Japan (9984.T) and Honda Motor Co Ltd (7267.T) to develop a robot taxi service that could navigate safely through the streets of the city of San Francisco at the end of next year, putting it ahead Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Self-driving unit of Waymo, Uber and Lyft. 

Those expectations are now reaching the speed limit, according to interviews with eight current and former GM and Cruise employees and executives, along with nine autonomous vehicle technology experts familiar with Cruise. These sources say that some unexpected technical challenges, including the difficulty that Cruise's cars have in identifying whether objects are in motion, mean that GM's driverless cars are unlikely to be on the road on a large scale in 2019. 

"Nothing is within the schedule," said a GM source, referring to certain mileage targets and other milestones that the company no longer met. 

Cruise general manager Kyle Vogt told Reuters last month that the service will offer passengers "a major form of transportation" in most places they want to go, and will compete with Uber and Lyft. The use of driverless cars to transport customers who pay fares would allow Cruise to recover investments in expensive technology and make profits faster than trying to sell autonomous cars to the few individual customers who could afford them.  

In addition, operating autonomous cars in a taxi service would allow Cruise and GM to adapt the service to the limitations of the technology until the software and sensors are ready to allow autonomous vehicles to go anywhere. 

"Based on where we are and where we have been, we are on track to reach that goal" 2019, said Vogt.  

However, some who are close to the project recognize the amount of time and money it will take for the transportation service to be operational. 

"We know we're not commercially ready now," said Michael Ronen, managing partner of SoftBank Investment Advisers and Cruise's chief investor in the Cruise deal that will join Cruise's board of directors. "I think now the question is who is going to succeed and how fast." 

Reuters learned that Cruise's driverless cars are still struggling to identify whether objects on the road are moving or parked, according to one of the current and three former Cruise employees who have witnessed the problem. The result is that vehicles hesitate and stop when passing a line of motorcycles or parked bicycles, they said. 









A self-driving cruise car, owned by General Motors Corp, is seen outside the company's headquarters in San Francisco, where it conducts most of its tests, in California, USA. UU., September 26, 2018. REUTERS / Heather Somerville



Sometimes, the software has not recognized pedestrians and, by mistake, has seen ghost bicycles, which has caused cars to brake erratically, according to two sources. And Cruise still does not have a data exchange collaboration with the San Francisco Fire Department, a necessary step to train cars to respond to sirens from fire trucks, according to a fire department spokesman. 

In addition, the open-source software robotic tools that Cruise used to develop the technology have delays that slow down messages from car sensors to the car's brain, according to a fourth former employee and nine other people familiar with Cruise's technology.  

Cruise's Vogt said the next generation of hardware, software and sensors in the pipeline can help solve these problems and improve performance. 

"At the beginning of the development, I'm sure there were phases where we were combining the systems where they did not meet the requirements we needed for the launch, and that's part of the testing and development process," he told Reuters. 

"Safety is our launch measure, so we will certainly do it (we will solve) at the moment when we will launch cars on the road without drivers," he added. 

GM's drive to be seen as a leader in autonomous vehicle technology is critical at a time when the automaker's stock declined more than 20 percent in the year. The delivery of the capital promised by SoftBank and Honda of Japan depends on Cruise achieving certain performance objectives. 

Cruise's competitors face their own challenges, and some experts predict that a jolt of rival efforts is inevitable. Uber, for example, had to check his production timeline after a fatal crash with one of his automatic SUVs. Although the autonomous vehicles program is still paused after the accident, a company official said Uber is making progress, creating safeguards to improve the overall functionality and safety of Uber's automatic driving cars.  

"Everyone in the industry is increasingly nervous about the waste of billions of dollars," said Klaus Froehlich, a BMW board member and his head of research and development. 

"CHALLENGE OF OUR GENERATION" 

GM President Dan Ammann calls for the development of an automated vehicle that can navigate the streets of the city more safely than a human driver as "the engineering challenge of our generation" and a project that ultimately It will take years and billions of dollars to fully develop. 

"Right now we are in a race to the starting line," he said in an interview with Reuters.   

"Getting stuck in a particular parameter, or in a particular scenario, lacks the fundamental point of what the total overall performance of the system is," said Ammann. 

Cruise's goal for 2019 will advance only if the Cruise system meets safety standards that the automaker has established and shown to regulators, he added. 

Cruise says he has not started offering trips to the public and that cars do not work without a safety driver. The company has yet to apply for permits for passengers to travel without a driver, according to the California Commission on Motor Vehicle Services and Utilities. 

SoftBank says it took into account the setbacks for the technology in its $ 2.25 billion deal with Cruise. One provision says that more than half of SoftBank's investment will come only when Cruise can commercially deploy vehicles in a driverless operation, according to GM's public documents. 

"It's a speculative investment," said Ronen of SoftBank. "These are technologies not yet tested." 

(To see a graph of SoftBank's investments, click on tmsnrt.rs/2yrKBQ9) 

In revealing plans for a $ 2.8 billion investment in Cruise earlier this month, Honda executive Seiji Kuraishi said he sees potential in Cruise due to his relationship with GM, and that most of his investment will be made after The Cruise deadline in 2019 and will be extended to more than 12 years. 

Shortly after the acquisition of GM in 2016, Cruise leaders acknowledged internally that they faced a technical challenge of a decade, according to a former Cruise employee. 

Vogt gave a speech at the time to his employees and asked them not to throw all night or be burned, said the source, who was present at the talk. 

Cruise and GM began missing the first milestones they had set, including the first deadline less than a year after GM's acquisition of Cruise, according to two former Cruise employees and a former GM employee.  

Public records with the San Francisco Department of Motor Vehicles and an industry source familiar with the issue talk about other lost goals. For example, it failed to get Cruise's cars to record the fewest times a human has to take control of a vehicle compared to its rivals in 2017. Cruise also lost the goal of recording a million miles a month early of 2018. 

The company said the goal of the mileage was based on its test footprint at the time, which still included a significant portion of the tests in environments such as the suburbs of Phoenix. Since then, it has redirected efforts in testing in San Francisco, where total mileage is lower, but the company expects a higher rate of "learning" due to the complexity of the environment. 

"With 10 engineers, you can screw a lot of sensors to a car and put a computer on it and drive it around the block," Vogt told Reuters. A commercial product is "about 10,000 times more difficult," he said.     





Additional reports by Paul Lienert, Joe White and Ben Klayman in Detroit; Edition by Greg Mitchell and Edward Tobin





Our Rules:The principles of trust of Thomson Reuters.

        .

  !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)

  {if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?

  n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};

  if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';

  n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;

  t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];

  s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script',

  'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js');

  fbq('init', '369524843414444');

  fbq('track', 'PageView');

    .


SOURCE LINK ERESVIRAL.COM 
https://www.beviral.online