The Traffic of San Francisco may Benefit Autonomous Car Testing

There is no doubt that traffic of San Francisco is ridiculous. According to Cruise, the driving division of General Motors, this is a good thing when it comes to testing autonomous vehicles. Kyle Vogt CEO of Cruise who said, “The complexity is exponentially harder” on the notoriously clogged streets of the city. Vogt said, “We think it’s absolutely necessary to accelerate the process toward releasing driverless vehicles. Encountering challenging situations at a higher rate gives more examples to work on when we’re back at headquarters writing software, so we can iterate at a faster rate. We are making rapid progress toward our goal of taking a driver out of the car.”

Last month, GM and Cruise disclosed a third-generation self-driving car, which they said could be mass produced at GM assembly plants. Vogt said, “There is almost no comparison between driving in an urban environment and a suburban one.” He highlighted some differences in a blog post. “For every 1,000 miles of autonomous driving, cars in San Francisco had to deal with lane changes 772 times, versus 143 in Phoenix’s suburbs. They had to pass in the opposing lane 422 times in the city versus just 17 in the Phoenix area.” He said, “Miles are not created equally.”

The cruise provides rides to employees in its robot cars via a ride-hailing app. Vogt said, “It’s given us some valuable feedback. By having real people in the car, having direct feedback on what those rides feel like; we’ve been able to make some tweaks to our software to improve the experience.”

According to DMV records, Cruise has far more robot cars in California as compared to other companies. It has 105 cars allowed for testing here, up from 47 just two months ago. Uber has 29; Waymo, 25; Tesla, 24; and Zoox, 11. The other 37 robot-car makers each have only single-digit numbers of vehicles on the road.

Also, California wants from self-driving cars to report all accidents. Except for Cruise, no other company has reported any accidents, and all the reported accidents were normal. Vogt said, “Anyone who has visited San Francisco knows driving here is kind of ridiculous. Our vehicles must be assertive, nimble and sometimes a bit creative.”

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