GM and Cruise on track to field a self-driving ride hailing service by 2019
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Some fun facts from the presentation:
> Cruise has 1,200 employees, up from 90 at acquisition in early 2016. (Vogt just specified only 400 are full-time at Cruise) Planning to have ~2100 by the end of 2018.
> They intend to get up to 1 million miles/month of testing in 2018.
> Their 3 simulators run 150 simulations per minute. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt repeatedly emphasizes Cruise's high rate of improvement.
> Their test map of SF shows they're staying off the freeways, but they're pretty much everywhere else.
> Cruise is focused on an initial deployment in SF, but sees value on testing in other cities to prevent overfitting for the SF driving environment. They also test in Phoenix, and are planning to launch in NYC.
> Cruise projects It will take about 6 months to map and prepare for scaled deployment in a new city.
> They expect to get Lidar costs down to ~$300 (either per vehicle or per unit, not specified) with their recent acquisition of Solid state Lidar startup Strobe.
> Their vehicles currently have 14 cameras, 3 articulating radars, 8 regular radars, 5 lidar units, and 10 ulrasonic proximity sensors.
> They're projecting they can get the cost of an AV to under $1.00 per mile in 2025.
> They project 20-30% margins after 2025.