Driverless Cars Not 'a Thing of the Distant Future,’ Says GM Engineer
Autonomous cars are "no longer a thing of the distant future,” Pam Fletcher, General Motors executive chief engineer, told a Citigroup technology conference in New York. Not everyone “can operate a car, so autonomous vehicles provide them with an option,”…
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she said Tuesday. “The most important benefit we see is absolutely safety.” More than 35,000 people die yearly on U.S. roads, and more than 90 percent “of those deaths are caused by human error," she said. GM’s $581 million acquisition of Cruise Automation in March (see 1607220003) “provides us with a team of talented software engineers who are creating the algorithms and the code to bring full autonomy to life and deliver autonomous technology in an on-demand ride-sharing service,” Fletcher said. What really attracted GM to Cruise was not only its autonomous-driving capabilities, but also that it was developing them “literally on the downtown streets of San Francisco,” she said. As an autonomous-driving test bed, San Francisco is “one of the most complex environments to try to build and deploy new technology,” she said. “The right answer for deployment of autonomous vehicles is in a ride-shared network." GM invested in Lyft (see 1601040068).