GM Goes Back to Future with New Round of Driverless Vehicle Testing

If this sounds familiar, it is because the company’s already engaged in years of this type of testing through its now-defunct Cruise subsidiary, culminating in a fleet of Chevy Bolt EVs forming a robotaxi service in San Fracisco. The results were encouraging until a Cruise vehicle hit a pedestrian in October 2023. After months of investigations, pledges of change, GM decided self-driving vehicles were an investment it couldn’t afford to make at that moment.

However, that hasn’t stopped a plethora of other companies, such as Waymo, Tesla, Nuro, Aurora Innovation, Motional, and most recently Zoox, from moving ahead. And while GM officials never said the company would step aside and allow some other group to develop the technology as Ford did, the move to begin a new version of testing may come as a slight surprise, but it shouldn’t. 

GM announced plans to introduce “eyes-off driving” in 2028 with the Cadillac Escalade IQ. So if that’s going to happen, so is some testing. However, GM’s doing the testing a little differently this time.

“Leveraging extensive data from manually driven vehicles running routes across select states and learnings from simulation and closed course testing, GM is now advancing its automated technology into the next phase: supervised testing operations on public roads,” the company said. 

“This real-world testing generates valuable data that informs our ongoing simulation and closed-course testing, while building confidence in the signals from these important validation tools.”

The company plans to use data — more than one million miles of travel — already collected in real-world situations, plus the 800 million miles driven by Super Cruise-equipped vehicles. Plus the whole effort will use GM’s new centralized computing architecture to consolidate new data collected during the testing process.

Additionally, GM plans to create a “new safety report” during the testing to explain “how our Supervised Testing Operation Safety Case supports the safe operation of our supervised test fleet on public roads.” In essence, those who are interested can see what GM is using to develop the system.

[Images: General Motors]

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