https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1503859359184531456?s=20&t=t5OjJNcGwJM_g5CjD8d4kg
https://twitter.com/olivercameron/status/1501671103806132224?s=20&t=dMqBjak2r8nVyXZrDfSyyQ
These are two short videos of autonomous Cruise vehicles driving around San Francisco. Cruise, which is owned by General Motors, received a permit from the state of California to operate autonomous vehicles -- without a safety driver -- in September of last year. In November 2021, one of the cofounders of Cruise took the first ever driverless taxi ride in the company's history. And on February 1, 2022, Cruise announced that it was opening up to the public.
If you read the comments on Twitter you'll see that some people have found these vehicles to be hyper reactive to traffic lights and to do oddly long pauses at stop signs. So I guess they're not perfect. But oddly long pauses are certainly better than not stopping at all. Either way, this is a big deal. I'm not sure if these are the first unsupervised autonomous vehicles out in the wild, but they are easily some of the first.
There has been a lot of discussion over the last few years about autonomy being a hugely tricky technical problem to solve. One that is perhaps more difficult than a lot of people thought it would be at the outset. I'm assuming that this is at least one of the reasons why ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft ended up selling off their AV divisions while searching for profitability.