Zebeth Media Solutions

robotaxi

Cruise has expanded its driverless robotaxi service to daytime hours • ZebethMedia

Cruise is expanding its driverless ride-hailing service in San Francisco to daytime hours, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt tweeted Wednesday. The robotaxi service is now available to employees from 5 a.m. to 4 p.m. and then again from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eventually, these expanded operating hours will be available to the public. The bolstered hours are the latest expansion of the GM subsidiary’s driverless operations in San Francisco. Cruise opened its driverless robotaxi service, in which there is not a human safety operator, to the public in early 2022. Initially, the rides were free, limited to small portions of the city and only offered between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. That service has expanded over time. Cruise began charging for rides in June 2022. Today, public customers can hail (and are charged for) driverless rides between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. About 70 Cruise AVs are operating in the service. Cruise has about 300 AVs across its operations in San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix. Fares include a base fee of $5 and a $0.90 per mile and $0.40 per-minute rate. A 1.5% city tax is also included in the price. An estimated fare is calculated using the estimated time and distance of the fastest, most optimal route. Cruise shares that estimate fare with customers and will charge that amount if the time or distance of the actual ride takes longer. Cruise doesn’t have surge pricing. Image Credits: Cruise Earlier this month, Cruise expanded its service area to most of San Francisco. For now, that expanded area is only available to employees. Cruise is also expanding operations to Austin and Phoenix. In October, the company invited potential passengers in Phoenix and Austin to join the waitlist to be among the first robotaxi passengers. During GM’s third-quarter earnings call, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said the company remains on track to complete its first commercial driverless public rides and deliveries by the end of the year. Cruise will likely follow a similar playbook in Austin and Phoenix as it has in San Francisco, albeit at a faster pace considering both locations are in states with fewer regulatory hurdles than California. In San Francisco, Cruise typically starts with its own employees and then opens it up to the public. The service area and hours also start small and grow, each time being first offered to employees.

Now anyone can hail a Waymo robotaxi in downtown Phoenix • ZebethMedia

Waymo has opened up its fully driverless ride-hail service in downtown Phoenix to members of the general public. Previously, the company had only been operating a commercial service with no safety driver behind the wheel for participants in its “trusted tester” program. The expansion in Phoenix is yet another sign of Waymo’s accelerated push towards commercialization. It comes a day after Waymo secured its driverless deployment permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which allows Waymo to charge for autonomous services, like delivery, in San Francisco. More importantly, it’s a prerequisite to securing the California Public Utilities Commission’s own driverless deployment permit, which Waymo needs to operate a commercial robotaxi service with no human safety operator in the city. Waymo’s service in downtown Phoenix will mirror the one it has operated in Chandler, Arizona since 2020. It will be a paid rider-only service that’s available 24/7 to anyone who downloads the app and hails a ride Waymo’s service area. Waymo said this is an important step as it plans to expand the service to even more of the downtown area in coming months. Earlier this month, Waymo also launched rides, with a driver in the front seat, to Phoenix’s airport from the city’s downtown. The service is currently only available to trusted testers, but will likely expand using the same recipe Waymo has used throughout its many expansions — Waymo will probably next test fully driverless rides to the airport with employees before opening that up to trusted testers, and then finally to members of the public. Waymo did not confirm or deny this roadmap. Waymo’s service area in downtown Phoenix. Image Credits: Waymo Waymo did not say how many of its fleet of Jaguar I-Pace’s would be dedicated to the commercial ramp in Phoenix, but a spokesperson told ZebethMedia the company is ready to meet what it projects to be a “healthy demand” for a 24/7 autonomous ride-hailing service downtown.

Waymo can now charge for fully driverless services in San Francisco • ZebethMedia

The California Department of Motor Vehicles approved an amendment to Waymo’s existing deployment permit Wednesday to include driverless, as well as drivered, operations. Now, Waymo will be able to charge for usage of its autonomous vehicles, which will operate without anyone in the driver’s seat, for services like food and grocery delivery. The upgraded DMV permit is a prerequisite to launching a fully autonomous commercial ride-hail service in San Francisco, as its main competitor Cruise did this summer. All Waymo needs now is a driverless deployment permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to finally start charging for rider-only autonomous rides in the city. The company will be eligible to apply for that permit once it has operated its driverless cars on public roads for at least 30 days. Waymo has been operating with its drivered deployment permit from the DMV since last October, which allowed the company to begin a commercial autonomous delivery pilot in San Francisco with Albertsons earlier this year. Per the permit’s requirements, a human safety operator has to be in the front seat during operations. Waymo’s service area in San Francisco. Image Credit: Waymo Waymo then received a CPUC drivered deployment permit in February this year and began charging its “trusted testers” for robotaxi rides with a human safety operator in the front seat in May. Between June and August, Waymo completed more than 709,000 miles with a safety driver in the state of California, according to the CPUC’s quarterly report. The company recently expanded its service in downtown Phoenix to include trips, with a human safety operator, to Phoenix’s airport, and said it would launch a robotaxi service in Los Angeles.

XPeng to begin autonomous driving public road tests in Guangzhou • ZebethMedia

XPeng received a permit Monday to begin testing its G9 electric SUV as an autonomous vehicle on public roads in Guangzhou. The company will begin testing a small fleet as soon as possible with a human safety operator in the driver’s seat. This is a milestone for XPeng as it aims to use its vehicles for robotaxi operations in the future. The G9 is the first mass-produced vehicle to qualify for such tests in China, Xpeng claims. The company is pursuing an approach of using EVs off the shelf for dual purposes — autonomous applications and individual sales — to lower the cost of production and make its vehicles more commercially viable. This is especially salient in the wake of Argo AI’s shutdown, with Ford and Volkswagen pulling their investments in the company in order to prioritize nearer term bets like in-house built advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). The news follows XPeng’s announcement at its annual 1024 Tech Day that the G9 passed a government-led autonomous driving closed field test, which made it eligible for approval of further testing. Most, if not all, current autonomous vehicle operators rely on existing vehicle models that have been retrofitted with hardware and software suites to drive autonomously. In the U.S., Waymo uses Jaguar I-Paces and Cruise uses Chevrolet Bolts. XPeng’s G9, which was unveiled in September as a passenger vehicle, will be tested for robotaxi applications without any hardware modifications — higher-end versions of the G9 will be built with Nvidia’s Drive Orin chips and rely on 31 sensors, including a front-view camera and dual lidar sensors. That means the vehicle that’s being tested for robotaxi operations is the same vehicle that will be sold to private passengers. The only difference will be in the software. By early next year, G9s purchased by individuals in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Shanghai will have the option of downloading XNGP software, which is XPeng’s “full scenario” ADAS that promises to automate highway driving, city driving and parking tasks. The G9s XPeng will use for autonomous vehicle testing will be given an upgrade that allows them to perform  Level 4 autonomy. Level 4 autonomy means the vehicle can drive itself without requiring a human safety operator to take over as long as it’s in certain conditions, like a geofenced area or time of day. XPeng will integrate data from both private passenger vehicles and autonomous test vehicles to continue to operate both systems in parallel, a spokesperson said. The company aims to test its vehicle for robotaxi applications over the next two to three years as it develops its next generation vehicle, with the goal of launching that by 2025 as one of the options, according to Xinzhou Wu, XPeng’s VP of autonomous driving. “Hopefully the software will be in good shape by then so we can at least see a limited scenario similar to what Cruise is doing now,” Wu told ZebethMedia. Wu said that while the new vehicle will have a full sensor suite, it probably won’t come in the form of a purpose-built AV — XPeng for now is sticking with a strategy of using the same mass-produced vehicle for passenger vehicle sales as it does for robotaxi operations. XPeng also doesn’t intend to run its own robotaxi operation in the future. The company envisions itself as more of a provider of the software, and possibly the hardware, stack for other ride-hail focused companies.

China’s XPeng wants to launch robotaxi network using G9 SUV • ZebethMedia

Chinese luxury EV startup XPeng is moving forward on its plans to launch a robotaxi business. The company’s latest G9 SUV became China’s first mass-produced commercial vehicle to pass a government-led autonomous driving closed-field test, the company said Monday at its fourth annual 1024 Tech Day. When XPeng unveiled the G9 in September, the company said it would come equipped with XPeng’s new advanced driver assist system (ADAS), the XNGP, which combines XPeng’s Highway Navigated Guided Pilot (NGP) and City NGP to automate certain driving functions in both highway and urban driving scenarios. Now, XPeng says the XNGP is good enough to lay the groundwork for a robotaxi network, and the G9 can help that network scale, according to XPeng’s vice president of autonomous driving, Dr. Xinzhou Wu. “Obtaining the road test permit by our mass-produced commercial vehicles — with no retrofit — is a major achievement,” said Wu at XPeng’s Tech Day. “Our platform-based robotaxi development aims to generate significant cost benefits, and ensure product quality, safety and user experience.” Image Credits: XPeng XPeng attributes its advances in autonomy to its next-generation visual perception architecture, XNet, which adopts an in-house developed deep neural network that delivers visual recognition with “human-like decision-making capabilities, drawing from multiple cameras’ data,” according to the company. XPeng says the neural network technology overrides manual processing logic to constantly self-improve. XNet is backed by Fuyao, a Chinese supercomputing center for autonomous driving, and supported by Alibaba Cloud’s intelligent computing platform, XPeng said. This helps XNet reach a supercomputing capability of 600 PFLOPS, which the company says increases the training efficiency of its AV stack by over 600 times. This is a bold claim, one that posits model training can be reduced to 11 hours, rather than the 276 days it took previously. XPeng says the upgrades to its AV stack have allowed the company to establish an entirely closed-loop autonomous driving data system — from data collection and labeling to training and deployment — that has been able to resolve over 1,000 edge cases each year and reduce the incident rate for Highway NGP by 95%. The robotaxis will also feature XPeng’s new AI-powered voice assistant, according to He Xiaopeng, co-founder and CEO of XPeng. The voice system incorporates Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) multi-zone technology to recognize commands from every passenger in the cabin and understand various instructions across multiple streams of conversations. XPeng says its voice assist tech doesn’t need an internet connection or an activation command (like “Hey Siri”), and is good enough to be accurate 96% of the time and operate in less than one second. XPeng will make the new voice assist technology standard on all new vehicles in China, the company said. XPeng’s robot pony and eVTOLs Image Credits: XPeng At XPeng’s Tech Day, the company also provided updates to its robot pony and flying car. Let’s start with the pony. It’s certainly cuter-looking than Tesla’s humanoid robot, but no less fantastical to imagine going to market anytime soon. Regardless, XPeng shared some design upgrades to support “mutlidegree-of-freedom” motion and locomotion capabilities that might get it closer to moving more naturally. This will help the robot adapt better to “complex indoor and outdoor terrain conditions such as stairs, steep slopes and gravel roads,” according to XPeng. Image Credits: XPeng XPeng also revealed an upgraded design for its electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) flying car, which is being developed by affiliate XPeng Aeroht. When XPeng first unveiled its flying car concept, it had a horizontal dual-rotor structure. This year’s design features a new distributed multi-rotor configuration. The test vehicle successfully completed its maiden flight and multiple single-motor failure tests, XPeng said Monday. XPeng also provided some more information of how a driver would go from controlling a car to a flying car — in flight mode, the car will be piloted using the steering wheel and the gear lever will be used to control movement forward and backward, make turns, ascend, hover and descend, the company claims.

Inside Motional’s strategy to bring robotaxis to market • ZebethMedia

Motional, the Hyundai-Aptiv joint venture that aims to commercialize autonomous driving technology, announced last week its partnership with Uber to bring robotaxi services to North American cities over the next 10 years. The Uber deal comes off the back of similar partnerships with Via and Lyft to launch robotaxi services in Las Vegas. Sensing a pattern emerging, we reached out to Akshay Jaising, Motional’s new VP of commercialization, who joined the company in July after doing a stint as the director of business development at Kitty Hawk, the electric aviation startup backed by Larry Page that shut down last month. Jaising ran us through the different aspects of Motional’s go-to-market strategy. The upshot? Motional sees partnerships as a way to meet the customer where they already are.  The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. ZebethMedia: Lyft, Via and now Uber. It looks like Motional thinks partnerships are really the way to go. Can you walk me through your thinking? Akshay Jaising: The way we view it is we have limited resources. Our core competency is building the autonomy stack, right? We want to stay focused on doing that piece. There’s other companies like Uber and Lyft that have developed a network for folks to hail rides. We think it makes sense to partner with them especially as the technology matures because we’re taking a very customer-centric view. As a customer, you want to go to one app to get from point A to point B and you want all the options you need to get there. So we want to be part of that concentration set. It allows us to make our technology accessible to millions of riders. People who are used to using an app are now going to be delighted and surprised to see ‘Oh, there’s an option to take an autonomous car from Motional!’ It also gives us a little bit more runway as the technology matures. Initially, we expect smaller deployments. As we mature, you will have larger scale, and you’ll be able to sell more routes. Taking the pathway of trying to create our own app would be more challenging from a customer perspective. If you open an app and there’s not always a ride available, it doesn’t meet your needs and you’re going to stop checking that application. Versus seamlessly integrating into your day-to-day mode of transportation and you get an option now to use an autonomous vehicle.  Cruise and Waymo seem to be more vertically integrated at this stage, as both the tech provider and operator. Is that something Motional would consider in the long run? When it comes to scaling, it’s a unit economics discussion, and that’s where I think partnerships become critical. The ecosystem includes mature businesses that have done pieces of that value chain over time, and have become really good at it. And with that, they’ve got cost efficiencies that they’re able to translate to value for a customer.  Could we try to do everything? We could. But could we do it most efficiently and at a price point where the customer can actually benefit? How do we do it profitably and deploy at scale? And that’s where I think the partnerships are really important. What does it look like selling this technology to ride-hail platforms? Like, is Motional essentially the gig worker with their own car in this scenario? Image Credits: Motional Without getting into the specifics of the agreement, at the high level, Motional is the provider for vehicles on the Uber or Lyft platform. That’s not to say this couldn’t change in the future. There are companies that are really good at fleet management, and maybe there’ll be merging partnerships in that space, as well. But right now we are doing the entire soup to nuts — not only developing the tech, but it’s our vehicles. It’s our partnership with Hyundai that allows us to offer a customized experience. Our value proposition is we have great technology but we also have thought about the customer and integrated key features into the vehicle based on that. So for example, we have cameras for in-cabin monitoring, which are well integrated. We have customer assistance buttons on the exterior of the car, so if you have issues with unlocking the car with your app, you can actually request assistance. So we bundle that as a service and we’re like okay, here’s why a partnership with us can help you scale and offer an additional option to your customers.  Are you trying to come into cities fully driverless from the get-go? Everything we do is focused on safety and scaling when we are ready. At this stage, we feel the right approach is to go drivered first. So we’ll have a fleet of drivered vehicles and then as the technology matures — we’ve got certain metrics and milestones we have to hit — we’ll take the driver out of the vehicle, so it would be a phased approach. Would Motional be interested in working with an OEM to build a purpose-built AV, like Cruise with its Origin? We just launched our partnership with the Hyundai Ioniq 5s, and we’re focused on that. We have nothing to share beyond that, but we’re constantly thinking of what’s next.  Would Motional pursue a commercialization route of integrating your tech into private passenger vehicles?  Right now, the technology is expensive, which is why we’ve taken a fleet-first approach. When you look at personal car ownership, the challenge is because the cost is high, it’s gonna be a small segment who buy it, and people use their cars maybe two hours a day, right? So they’re not fully utilizing this expensive asset. Deploying it in a fleet, we get a lot of exposure to the technology, we have the chance to advance it and bring the cost down. So I think down the road, there will be an opportunity to start integrating Level 4 autonomy into mainstream vehicles, but we think that’s

Subscribe to Zebeth Media Solutions

You may contact us by filling in this form any time you need professional support or have any questions. You can also fill in the form to leave your comments or feedback.

We respect your privacy.
business and solar energy