Cruise reveals its Origin: An electric, driverless taxi

Those of you familiar with autonomous vehicle developer crews may recognize its autonomous Chevy bolts which are testing on certain roads in America today. This is something completely different. Just unveiled a couple of minutes ago and this is very loud room is the crews origin, the company's vision for an autonomous electric ride hailing vehicle of the future. And yes, it's a bit of an autonomous. People moving box on wheels and I'm not a huge fan of that design but as a bit of a driving appliance I'm pretty alright with this one. The design is built around maximizing space inside for the passengers and keeping them safe on the road and it starts with the design the vehicle using the GM sourced electric power train which puts the motor down low near the wheels and the battery under the passenger compartment. That frees up space inside that would typically be dedicated to a combustion engine for people and there's plenty of space inside there's room for up to four passengers who sit facing and where do I think you could probably cram six in if you really needed to squeeze in on your way to the party. The vehicle use a sliding doors which are good for the city because you don't wanna swing out hitting cyclists or other pedestrians when you're loading and unloading in the city. In being totally autonomous, there's no driver seat, no peddles, no steering wheel, the whole thing is completely run by software and cruiser sensors which we've been testing on the roads over the last three years. Also debuts is a couple of new sensor packages including an optical sensor that can swivel quickly to acquire let's not call them targets but maybe pedestrians and cyclists as it drives down the road and it can see in complete darkness. Cruz calls this superhuman sensing it helps the vehicle see everything that's happening around it as it rides around autonomously. The company also says that the vehicle is modular and upgradable. And as its sensor technology, the sensor software has even the electric power train get better over time. The Origin right here will also get better. And that's gonna mean that they're going to be able to keep prices down. They're gonna be able to keep price for ride down. And they're going to be able to keep these things on the road for an expected duty cycle of over a million miles per vehicle. And as they ramp up to scale, because they're not putting a lot of things that typically you put in a piloted vehicle, well, they expect that they're gonna be able to eventually build the origin for about half as much as a traditional electric SUV. Tell ramp up the scale. They've got other ideas in mind including using the origin as a cargo vehicle or for some other purposes. Now production estimates and launch windows are still very nebulous at this point, but we're going to be following this story as it develops. So we expect to learn more over the coming days. So keep it locked to the roadshow calm for even more details as they emerge.