GM Says It Will Put Fleets of Self-Driving Cars In Cities In 2019 (detroitnews.com)

General Motors has laid out a plan to not only mass-deploy self-driving cars on public roads in 2019, but to do it profitably. "With a driverless ride-hailing service as its framework, GM is counting on cost reductions, advancements in autonomous technologies and growth of the ride-hailing market to enable a successful self-driving car launch in 2019," reports The Detroit News. From the report: The automaker is using the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt as its autonomous mule, dovetailing Thursday's autonomous projection with GM's earlier vow to roll out a profitable electric vehicle platform by 2021. "For GM to get the benefit they're looking for, they need these cars on the road at scale as soon as possible," said Navigant Research analyst Sam Abuelsamid. "With ride-hailing services, consumers are saved from sticker shock of how much an EV costs -- and the cost of automation in early years is going to be expensive, too." GM didn't say exactly where it plans to launch its driverless ride-hailing service, but identified "dense urban environments" in the presentation. The Detroit automaker's testbeds for the self-driving Bolt are in Warren, San Francisco and Scottsdale, Arizona.

Comments

What if self-driving cars turn into an OS/2 flop?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I remember back then that OS/2 was supposed to be the future. Folks were investing millions in it.

What will happen if self-driving cars turn out to be a flop? Will we be able to at least salvage some of all that money that venture capitalists are throwing at it . . . ?

Re:What if self-driving cars turn into an OS/2 flo

[Kjella]

Not really an apples-to-apples comparison, OS/2 flopped but only because a different brand of OS won the market while computer use itself exploded. For self-driving cars as a genre to flop it must either end up being unfeasible (cold fusion), unpractical (flying cars), too expensive for the mass market (private jets) or unwanted (3D TV) so that there is no winner just a dead end. Cars exists and are obviously all of the above. Self-driving cars would quite clearly practical and wanted. So it comes down to whether it can be done, at a cost people can pay.

While it's a bit presumptuous to assert the latter before we've solved the former it seems to me that the cost estimates for a sufficient sensor array and equipment are well within the economically feasible compared to a taxi driver, limo service, truck driver and the luxury market - whether it'll be cheap enough to become a standard feature and whether it'll work under all conditions is a topic of debate but not really necessary to address. If it'll work in downtown Phoenix, it works somewhere and it would be strange if they can't expand on that.

It doesn't mean that the first to market will be the winner in the long run though, before Google there was AltaVista and before Facebook there was MySpace. A self-driving car could be a huge game changer where "traditional" driving experience metrics don't matter because you're not driving, even taxis and such are heavily influenced by what they'd like to drive all day and it could be very disruptive for what we consider a "good car". But that's just competition, some might flop and implode like Nokia did in the cell phone market but that's because Apple and Google took over. Cell phones as such very much live on.