Every year, millions of people die in vehicular traffic accidents, and 95 percent of these are due to human error. Elon Musk articulates that human-driven cars are hazardous to safe transportation. With an end in mind of modifying all vehicles into a highway autopilot system, which is deemed to be much safer than manual driving, autonomous or self-driving vehicles are being established.
General Motors, through its acquired start-up Cruise Automation, unveils a new generation of self-driving Chevrolet Bolt EV and claims it to be the first mass-producible
EV in the world. “This isn’t just a concept design — it has airbags, crumple zones, and comfortable seats. It’s assembled in a high-volume assembly plant capable of producing 100,000’s of vehicles per year, and we’d like to keep that plant busy,” Kyle Vogt, Cruise Automation CEO and founder, said.
This version of self-driving Chevy Bolt, which will serve as shuttle service to Cruise employees around San Francisco using the cruise app, is the first to meet the company’s standards for safety and redundancy systems. According to Vogt, it has electrical, communication and actuation systems that are almost entirely new and fault-tolerant.
“All of these new systems are important because a driverless vehicle can’t rely on a human as a backup system,” he writes. “If something on a vehicle fails while there is an attentive human in the driver’s seat, they can yank the wheel or stomp on the brake pedal to avoid an incident. This isn’t the case for a car with no driver, so we built backup systems. And in some cases, we built backups for the backups — and backups for those systems, too.”
