The future has been creeping up on us pretty fast in the past few years and with the advancement of technology comes the advancements of everything else. With that said, G.M. reported that on Friday, January 12th they submitted a petition to the United States Department of Transportation for permission to start operating fully autonomous cars — without steering wheels or pedals — in a commercial ride-hailing service next year.
“Self-driving technology is only going to have a big impact if we can deploy it at large scale,” G.M.’s chief financial officer, Dan Ammann, said in an interview. “We intend to launch a commercial ride-share service at commercial scale in 2019. That will begin in one city and scale up in that city and move to other cities after that.”
G.M.’s fully autonomous vehicle, the Cruise AV, will go into production once approval is granted and could be available for sale as early as 2019.
