Driverless Vehicles Set To Arrive In Nashville With “Robotaxi” Service Soon To Follow
Image Credit: getcruise.com
The Tennessee Conservative [By Paula Gomes] –
Driverless vehicles are set to arrive in Nashville this week with a “robotaxi” service soon to follow.
Cruise, a GM subsidiary, is behind the plan that initially operated out of San Francisco only. The company has grown from one city to seven since last year, having expanded to Austin, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, and now Nashville.
Kyle Vogt, Cruise CEO and co-founder, promised last week that Nashvillians will see “driverless @cruise AVs there in a few months.”
The company has established a formula for its rollouts in new cities. A new market first gets test vehicles with a “human safety operator” before operating commercially. Once the bugs are worked out, those test vehicles become driverless and a ride-hailing service becomes available to employees first, and then customers, who will be able to access the service on a limited basis before service area and hours are expanded slowly.
At this time, Cruise is operating commercially in only three markets: San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix. In San Francisco, the company isn’t able to charge for rides yet as the California Public Utilities Commission has not approved a final permit that they need.
What is behind the rapid scaling of markets? According to Vogt, Cruise’s “city-first strategy” has proven very successful. “This is the really remarkable thing about AVs,” he said in a thread on Twitter last Thursday. “They just keep getting better, and that progress is showing no signs of slowing.”
After testing their systems in San Francisco, Cruise theorized that “if we can make AVs work in a city like SF – with its fog, hills & traffic – they’ll work just about anywhere.”
After some work to adapt in Phoenix and Austin, the company found that their systems worked well pretty much right away with just a bit of tweaking in each new market.
Vogt says that each new city “requires less work than the last” allowing them to continue to expand quickly.
Driverless vehicles have long been part of the plan for the downtown area of another Tennessee city. The “smart city” of Chattanooga has been working on its infrastructure with plans to expand over the next two years to accommodate AVs.
Chattanooga has been experimenting with a 1.2 mile stretch outfitted with cameras, LiDAR, radar and audio devices to test technology in their quest of reaching a goal of zero traffic fatalities in the downtown area.
Vogt said in a Tweet on July 13th that Cruise had run an ad in several newspapers because “human drivers aren’t good enough. America can do better, and it is time we fully embrace AVs.”
About the Author: Paula Gomes is a Tennessee resident and reporter for The Tennessee Conservative. You can reach Paula at paula@tennesseeconservativenews.com.
Roads are not ‘safe’ with cars and drivers, and so they want to add driverLESS cars? No explanation for the idiocy behind this. Perhaps to get us off the roads. This is a train wreck looking for a place to happen.
WEE DO NOT WANT THIS COMMUNIST LEFTIS GARBAGE TRASH IN OUR STATE ITS PURE COMMUNISM AND WILL RESULT IN MANY DEATHS
Police and fire chiefs oppose these vehicles in San Fran because the driverless “Brian Kelsey” cars cannot deal with a human directing traffic, or construction zones, or a fire hose laid across the street. They lock up, shut down and turn on their hazard lights and cannot recover, blocking the way, accident scene or ambulance routes, until a human arrives to “reset” them.
Does Kelsey still get his kickback (in prison) for running the “autonomous vehicle technology” bill that they lied and said was for pre-existing tech like parking assist and cruise control?
This is a disaster in the making . None of the crazy ideas like this one will result in any good . If anyone in authority reads this post and does nothing to stop this madness then the blood is on your communist hands .