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 does not have a separate section for a driver; the car with the size of an average suv has no steering wheel, rear-view mirror, pedals or windscreen wipers. The vehicle is fitted with sliding doors on the sides and can accommodate six occupants, all of whom have a relatively large amount of legroom. They sit on two benches that face each other, so that the occupants can face each other. According to the three companies behind the car, the Origin is the answer to the question of what kind of transport system you would build if you could start from scratch.
Kyle Vogt, Cruise’s chief technology officer, told The Verge that the Origin’s great strength lies in its modular design. “The vehicle is built to last a million miles and all interior components have been replaced, including the computers and 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 modified. Experts estimate that the Origin should cost between $300,000 and $400,000. How much money is involved in a single ride is unknown and so is the battery capacity of the car.
The three companies split the work for the Origin. General Motors was responsible for the basic design and electric drive, while Honda helped to use the interior space efficiently. Cruise, the General Motors subsidiary behind the Cruise AV car, was responsible for the sensors and computer systems. For now, the Origin will run on a combination of radars, cameras and lidars, although that could be adjusted by the time the car goes into production, according to Vogt. The car is built on a completely new electric platform from General Motors and redundancy is an important element; According to Cruise, there are no single points of failure in terms of sensors, computing, networking and power, because there is no backup driver.
According to Cruise CEO Dan Ammann, the car will go into production as soon as the technology is so far that ‘superhuman driving’ in urban areas is possible. He is probably referring 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 it and what is around the corner, for example.