Cruise has a new release in its video series of drives completed by its autonomous test vehicles in San Francisco. If you’ve lived in the city, you’ve likely seen one of these by now – the white Chevrolet Bolt EVs stand out, especially with their autonomous sensor suite. The vehicles are running their routes mostly in autonomous mode, racking up driverless miles driven and helping GM-owned Cruise improve its tech over time.
This new video is the third in Cruise’s series of videos that the company has released in which it shows a continuous chunk of unbroken autonomous driving time. This instalment focuses on a night-time ride through San Francisco, and covers an entire hour of driving. You won’t actually have to sit and watch for an entire hour, however; the video above is sped up 4x, and the one below is running at 10x regular speed, but both depict the entire hour in a continuous cut. One noteworthy moment you probably want to check out happens at the 6:20 mark in the video above.
The car basically covered the eastern half of San Francisco during its route, Cruise tells me, from SOMA, through downtown and across Nob Hill. Cruise’s tech is clearly growing in competence over time, and night driving is an especially challenging needle to thread for self-driving cars.
GM recently filed documents indicating plans to deploy as many as 300 vehicles across the country, including in Detroit, San Francisco, and Scottsdale, Arizona. Cruise already gets vehicles in those areas, and said last September that it had around 30 vehicles in its test pool at the time.