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Either way, should we be counting on this new wave of firms to chase those ahead? Unsurprisingly, Mo Elshenavi, executive vice president of engineering at Cruise, isn’t convinced. “The state of the art as of today is not enough to bring us to the stage where Cruz is,” he says.
Cruise is one of the most advanced driverless-car firms in the world. Since November it has been running a live robottaxi service in San Francisco. Its vehicles operate in a limited area, but anyone can now hail a car with the Cruise app and drag it to the curb with no one inside. “We see a real spectrum of responses from our customers,” says ElShenawy. “It’s super exciting.”
Cruise has built a massive virtual factory to support its software, with hundreds of engineers working on different parts of the pipeline. ElShenawy argues that the mainstream modular approach is an advantage because it lets the company swap in new technology as it comes along.
He also rejected the idea that Cruz’s approach would not be common to other cities. “We could have launched in a suburb somewhere years ago, and that would have painted us in a corner,” he says. “We chose a complex urban environment like San Francisco, where we see hundreds of thousands of cyclists and pedestrians and emergency vehicles and cars that bite you—very intentional. It forces us to create something that Scales easily.”
But before Cruise can drive in a new city, he must first map out his streets in centimeter-level detail. Most driverless car companies use this type of high-definition 3D maps. They provide additional information to the vehicle on top of raw sensor data it receives while on the move, which typically includes signs such as lane boundaries and the location of traffic lights, or whether there are curbs on a particular section of the road.
These so-called HD maps are created by combining street data collected by cameras and lidar with satellite imagery. Millions of miles of roads have been mapped in this way in America, Europe and Asia. But road layouts change every day, which means map making is an endless process.
Many driverless car companies use HD maps created and maintained by specialist firms, but Cruise makes its own. “We can recreate cities – all driving conditions, road layouts and everything,” says ElShenawy.
This gives Cruise an edge against mainstream competitors, but newcomers like Wave and Autobrain have ditched HD maps altogether. Vayve’s cars have GPS, but they otherwise learn to read the road using sensor data alone. This can be difficult, but it means they are not tied to any particular place.
