Honda, Cruise and GM show self-driving electric vehicle without steering wheel – Image and sound – News

Honda, Cruise and General Motors unveiled the Cruise Origin at an event in San Francisco. This is a fully autonomous driving vehicle that looks like a small van. The car has no steering wheel and must become part of a fleet of cars that are shared.

The Cruise Origin has no separate section for a driver; the car with the size of an average SUV therefore has no steering wheel, rear-view mirror, pedals or windscreen wipers. The vehicle is equipped with sliding doors on the sides and offers space for six passengers, who all have relatively much legroom. They sit on two benches that face each other, so that the occupants can look at each other. According to the three companies behind the car, the Origin is the answer to the question what kind of transport system you would build if you could start all over again.

Kyle Vogt, the chief technology officer van Cruise, tells The Verge that the great power of the Origin is in the modular design. “The vehicle was made to last a million miles and all interior components can be replaced, which also applies to the computers and the sensors.” According to him, this leads to a situation in which the costs per mile are much lower than with a regular car that is adjusted. There are experts’ estimates that the Origin should cost between $ 300,000 and $ 400,000. How much money is involved in a single ride is unknown and that also applies to the battery capacity of the car.

The three companies have split the work for the Origin. General Motors was responsible for the basic design and the electric drive, while Honda helped to use the interior space efficiently. Cruise, General Motors’ subsidiary behind the Cruise AV car, was responsible for the sensors and computer systems. For the time being, the Origin operates on the basis of a combination of radars, cameras and lidars, although according to Vogt this can be adjusted by the time the car goes into production. The car is built on a completely new electric platform from General Motors and redundancy is an important element in this; according to Cruise there are none single points of failure in terms of sensors, computing power, networking and power, because there is no backup driver.

According to Cruise CEO Dan Ammann, the car goes into production as soon as the technology is so far that “superhuman driving” is possible in urban areas. He probably refers to the situation in which all vehicles communicate with each other and with certain objects, so that a car knows what the situation is around him and what comes around, for example.

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