Autonomous driving, reality? Yes, with one company Cruise

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 280

News 1. Cruise starts robo taxi in San Francisco, by invitation

The first real tests of robo taxi are happening in San Francisco now. After years of testing Cruise is opening the first taxi drives to the public. Passengers can apply, sign in, give their location and intention for taxiing (commute for example) Opinion: We witnessed it in san Francisco quite often. Cars with the cruise logo (with a person in the car) rolling through the street. Cruise has cleverly expanded the rides without drivers, step by step. Short rides, night drives, drives to deliver groceries (from Walmart). And now a major step, start of the real thing: taxi for the public. Only by invitation.

Step by step and careful about the acceptance among the community. Clever Cruise.

News 2. Cruise gathers big money again — $1,4 billion

Cruise has gathered $13bn in total in the last 9 years (founded in 2013) and was bought (majority stake) by General Motors. Today Softbank Vision Fund (early investor) adds another 1.4bn, exactly at the moment where live real taxi tests start. Larger investors are GM, GM Finance arm, Softbank, Honda and Walmart. Even Qualcomm was an early investor. Opinion: The finance construct is somewhat weird with an acquisition by GM, a $5bn debt financing by GM finance arm, Softbank putting billions into the bucket and two major junior investors Walmart and Honda. The consortium does show results.

13bn financing altogether, this is the price for an autonomous car unit (for all European manufactures to invest to hold on!).

News 3. Nick names for cars

The Cruise cars are based on GM models like the Chevy Bolt. But they have nick names, like Poppy, Burrito, Tostada. A different car , a “mini-bus” is also presented and called The Cruise Origin. It resembles Zoox, the AV car company that Amazon acquired. Opinion: The Cruise approach is very subtle. It is very wary of acceptance by the public — hence choosing nick names for the cars making them “ a friend”, familiar. And the car is full of tech and AI that can be impressive, even rejected by the public opinion. Cruise also concentrates in one city, San Francisco — and it helps.

Not a dog name, but AV car names!

Author is the research team (10 trend scouters) at specialist Space and Lemon Innovations (Hamburg, Berlin) — scouting innovations in main tech geographies, AI development, virtual worlds and e-commerce. Excerpts of research are gathered here in original weekly news since 2016, always with an opinion — no re-write of TechCrunch.

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