GM Aims for Self-Driving Supremacy in the San Francisco Night!

The safest race in the world is happening right now–it’s rapid, impossible to see and more expensive than any of us can imagine–oddly, it’s for your steering wheel. 

General Motors and its self-driving startup, Cruise Automation, just elbowed their way to the front of the autonomous pack by releasing footage from one of their Chevrolet Bolts shuttling itself around San Francisco after dark.

The car spends nearly an hour and a half ebbing and flowing through downtown traffic, dealing with cyclists, pedestrians, and haphazardly parked cars, without a single driver intervention as it made five scheduled stops.

The software was slightly hesitant around a car with its hazard lights on, and had a slight moment at a four-way intersection after a stopped car ahead accelerated away, just as another car was approaching. Also, notice how the car never made a single right turn on red. A corporate contact told TTAC the car is capable of making a right on red by itself, but the engineers had disabled the safety feature, before reiterating how highly safety is placed in the developmental hierarchy.

The march forward of the project has been impressive considering a little over a year ago Cruise was known for making aftermarket autonomous highway driving kits for Audi A4 derivatives before GM scooped them up in a $1 billion cash and stock deal, intending to make the software OEM.

The recent video comes in the wake of GM pledging $14-million to get more R&D space for its new self-driving subsidiary, along with plans to add 1,100 jobs over the next 5 years.