Imagine a world with no car crashes. Our self-driving vehicles aim to eliminate human driver error — the primary cause of 94 percent of crashes — leading to fewer injuries and fatalities. Imagine widespread use of electric-only vehicles, reducing vehicle emissions. Our self-driving vehicles will all be electric, contributing to a better environment.

CREATING NEW TECHNOLOGY TO BRING NEW BENEFITS

Imagine not sitting in traffic for what feels like half your life. And imagine a crowded city not filled with congested roads and parking lots and structures but with efficiently moving traffic and more space. Nearly one of three cars on city streets at any given time is simply
looking for parking. Our technology will create better use of time and space. For everyone.
Imagine the peace of mind knowing that whatever our age, our stage of life or our physical capabilities we have the freedom to go wherever we want to go. Our self-driving vehicles will improve access to mobility for those who currently cannot drive due to age,
disability, or otherwise. The pathway to get all of us to this world requires integrating the
software expertise of Silicon Valley with the systems safety and manufacturing expertise of Detroit and our teams around the world. With safety at the core, we are ready to take the next step.

  • Zero crashes to save lives
    Each year close to 1.25 million people die in car crashes around the world, 40,000 in the United States
    alone. More than 2 million people are injured. Human error is a major contributing factor in 94 percent
    of these crashes.
  • Zero emissions to leave our children a healthier planet
    Vehicles release almost 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year.
  • Zero congestion to give our customers back their precious time
    In the United States, commuters spend about a week of their lives in traffic each and every year. That’s
    a week not spent with those we love, doing what we want to do and being where we want to be.

THE RIDE
When we deploy our self-driving vehicles, customers will use a mobile app to request a ride, just like they use ride-sharing today. The only difference is that customers will control the experience — their customized climate control and radio station settings will be
sent to the vehicle ahead of when they access their ride. Our fleet operations will send a vehicle to a customer’s location for pickup and transport to the desired destination. Inside the vehicle, passengers will find touch screen tablets to access real-time status information
about the ride. The tablets will also remind passengers to close all doors and fasten their seat belts. Passengers will be able to communicate with remote support personnel with the press of a button. There’s another button for passengers to press if they want to end a ride because of an emergency. Support personnel may also initiate contact with vehicle passengers in certain circumstances where assistance may be needed, or if a passenger forgets an item in the vehicle after the end of a ride. Once the ride is over, if passengers forget to close the doors, the vehicle can close them itself and move on to the next customer.

You might think it looks like any other vehicle, but the Cruise AV was built from the start to operate safely on its own, with no driver. We engineered safety into the vehicle in every single step of design, development, manufacturing, testing and validation. Our self-driving vehicle is the result of intensely focused development, and countless hours of real-world testing and validation. It doesn’t drink and drive, doesn’t text and drive, doesn’t get upset, doesn’t get tired, never gets distracted and doesn’t produce any emissions. With its advanced sensor systems, the Cruise AV has the capability to see the environment around it, in 360 degrees, day and night. It is designed to identify pedestrians in a crosswalk, or an object darting suddenly into its path, and to respond accordingly. It can maneuver
through construction cones, yield to emergency vehicles and react to avoid collisions.

By integrating our self-driving system into the vehicle from the beginning, and through close coordination between the hardware and software teams, we have evaluated potential failure modes for all systems, and addressed them throughout development to ensure
a safe and reliable product. This comprehensive, integrated approach to safety, combined with testing in one of the most complex environments in the world, allows us to safely take the next step — elimination of the steering wheel, pedals and other manual controls
— from the vehicle. Our Cruise AV has the potential to provide a level of safety far
beyond the capabilities of humans. As our experience and iterative improvements continue, we will advance closer to our zero crashes vision.

HOW WE DESIGN A SAFE VEHICLE
General Motors is committed to safety in everything we do. With safety top of mind, our self-driving vehicle development process started by analyzing the act of driving itself. We broke down every action necessary to safely navigate from point A to point B and determined how to execute each action in different locations and conditions. We then challenged prototype after prototype through simulation and real-world testing to develop and refine how each of the vehicle’s systems work together to result in predictable,
safe driving. We have designed and built a self-driving car to safely operate among  aggressive drivers, jaywalkers, bicyclists, delivery trucks, construction, unprotected left turns, 4-way stop signs and countless other factors that arise when driving in the city.
To define and handle all these real-world interactions safely, we combined the best of Detroit, Silicon Valley and our teams around the world to continuously improve  performance and safety throughout design, development and deployment.

We developed our vehicle in one of the most complex environments possible — San Francisco — to ensure that our vehicle can drive safely even in the most unpredictable circumstances and conditions. This challenge helped us put our safety systems through rigorous tests. Our fleet is growing by the day, and each vehicle contributes to a shared knowledge base so that each vehicle can learn from the collective experiences of the entire fleet. If one car sees that a road is closed, the others automatically avoid it. Or if there’s a dangerous
road hazard, a single car can notify thousands of others to avoid a potentially unsafe situation. This fleet learning capability is just one of many advantages our vehicles have over human drivers. This combined data is used to improve each individual car’s performance and safety.

Our iterative design process doesn’t stop with initial launch; we will deploy our self-driving vehicles in GM-operated fleets, nabling continuous improvement into the future. We’re not only learning from what our test fleet does on the road, we’re also learning from what doesn’t happen. We combine data gathered from our extensive testing with comprehensive safety analyses to identify additional potential challenges we may not
have experienced on the road. Then we determine how best to respond to those unseen challenges as well. It’s all in the name of our zero crashes vision. We believe that a safe self-driving car must be built from the ground up, seamlessly integrating the self-driving system into the vehicle. That’s exactly what we did, starting with our all-electric Chevrolet
Bolt EV, a vehicle platform designed as a gateway to the future of transportation.

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At General Motors, we envision a future with zero crashes, zero emissions and
zero congestion