General Motors’ autonomous vehicle technology unit, Cruise, is set to launch its commercial robotaxi service in Austin and Phoenix before the end of 2022. Cruise’s robotaxi service already operates in San Francisco between 10:00 PM and 5:30 AM. GM is hoping that its West Coast experience will help it expand into more urban centers across the country. Austin and Phoenix are hot spots for autonomous vehicle development. It took Cruise only three weeks to get all the necessary permits to launch, compared to 33 months for San Francisco.
Kyle Vogt, Cruise’s CEO and co-founder, is aiming to generate $1 billion in revenue by 2025. The Austin and Phoenix operations will initially be small “revenue generating” endeavours with the intention of scaling up in 2023. Amidst this planned growth is a generally pessimistic market of investors who have been skeptical of large scale, publicly accessible autonomous taxi systems. However, Vogt thinks the public will become bullish about autonomous vehicles once they experience them: “I think people are going to be caught off guard by how quickly AVs (autonomous vehicles) go from the first ride that you've taken to available pretty much everywhere.”
Cruise closed its second quarter of 2022 with $25 million in revenue while its expenses increased to $550 million from $332 million in Q2 of 2021. Plans to keep expenses down are already in motion; the company is developing robots to clean and charge cars. Cruise is also developing custom chips that can allegedly reduce power consumption and system costs.
A new iOS app called Sniff is taking a different approach to social networking by connecting dog owners within the same neighbourhood. Rather than encouraging users to build broad online communities…
The fully autonomous ridesharing service, Waymo, is looking to add a new ridesharing option for Torontonians with self-driving vehicles. Waymo is a driverless taxi service where users can hail an…
Four years after Canada shut Huawei out of its 5G networks, one of its former subsidiaries is hoping for a second chance in the Canadian market. Honor Device Co., a Chinese consumer electronics…
Quantum computers have long been promised to reshape the leading edge of computing technology, facilitating machines capable of completing operations unthinkably time-intensive for classical computers…
Another day, another wearable technology product is hitting the market, but this one arrives with the weight of Google behind it and a price designed to undercut the competition.Back in January…
The Canadian federal government recently introduced the Safe Social Media Act in Parliament. If the bill is successful, Canadian children under the age of 16 will no longer be able to have accounts on…
