General Motors has been hitting the streets of San Francisco lately, and its autonomous Chevrolet Bolt (codenamed “Albatross”) just showed up in a new video on Wednesday, giving us a good look at the car’s self-driving controls in action.
The vehicle appears as part of a video demonstrating the Cruise Automation app in action. GM acquired Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based autonomous driving startup back in March for $1 billion. The company’s app has been available to General Motors employees for a couple of months, geared at testing out the new technologies through rides to and from work. Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise Automation, explained in a statement that the latest videos were shot in a single take after selecting a random destination using the mobile app.
In the latest video, uploaded Wednesday, Cruise shows off the car’s interior, as the steering wheel whizzes around to position the car:
The initial video, posted back in January, shows a sped-up dashcam view of how the Bolt behaves on the city’s busy streets:
General Motors has big plans to take on the autonomous car revolution. The company is working with Lyft to bring the self-driving Bolts to the rental company’s fleet of vehicles. In total, General Motors logged 9,776 miles of self-driving car testing in the state of California last year.
Automobile manufacturers are showing an increased interest in ride-sharing apps as part of their autonomous car strategies. Volkswagen launched Moia late last year, a spin-off company that aims to start self-driving pilot programs by 2020, while Tesla’s second master plan outlined a sharing program that could earn money for its owner by providing rides for people while the car is not in use.
In the case of Cruise, the company’s website claims that it’s testing vehicles in California, Arizona, and Michigan. It’s likely we’ll see more videos surface as the company continues to develop its offering, but whether the lessons from Cruise will fold into Lyft or the app will remain a separate entity remains to be seen.
