Volvo's Polestar Plans an Electric Ride-Hailing Robotaxi with Waymo (caranddriver.com) 18
Slashdot reader Way Smarter Than You shares this article from Car and Driver:
Polestar, the Volvo premium electric brand, will come out with a new electric vehicle platform just for ride-hailing vehicles. The automated driving technology is called Waymo Driver, and Waymo has been testing it in vehicles from a number of automakers, including Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan, and Renault. You'll be shocked to hear this, but Volvo thinks that self-driving vehicles will be safer than today's human-piloted models. Add Polestar to the list of companies that think Waymo has what it takes to bring us to an autonomous-vehicle future....
Polestar says that this new partnership will open up "new opportunities for the electric performance brand," including putting Waymo's fully self-driving technology — called Waymo Driver — into future Polestar vehicles. The deal makes Waymo the exclusive global Level 4 partner for Volvo Car Group. As defined by the SAE, Level 4 is a category of technology that can drive the car on its own in limited situations.
"Through our strategic partnership, we will first work together to integrate the Waymo Driver into an all-new mobility-focused electric-vehicle platform for ride-hailing services," Waymo said in a statement. In other words, some sort of Polestar premium autonomous robotaxi mobility service is coming, at some undefined point.
Polestar says that this new partnership will open up "new opportunities for the electric performance brand," including putting Waymo's fully self-driving technology — called Waymo Driver — into future Polestar vehicles. The deal makes Waymo the exclusive global Level 4 partner for Volvo Car Group. As defined by the SAE, Level 4 is a category of technology that can drive the car on its own in limited situations.
"Through our strategic partnership, we will first work together to integrate the Waymo Driver into an all-new mobility-focused electric-vehicle platform for ride-hailing services," Waymo said in a statement. In other words, some sort of Polestar premium autonomous robotaxi mobility service is coming, at some undefined point.
Electric autonomous ride-hailing taxi service (Score:3)
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Elon Musk is still claiming that Tesla will launch their robotaxi service this year. Obviously he is lying but it's an interesting race to see who gets first mover advantage in that market.
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Just after his announcement Credit Suisse upgraded Tesla's investment value rating, so not everyone is as confident as you. They're better than an average driver with two years experience on the road already, and we're only half-way through the year. Hopefully this tech will be ready by the time my driving skills start to deteriorate, since I hate driving already.
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Must be capital raising time... (Score:2)
Given the epic run on the markets we've had over the last six months, there is guaranteed to be quite a lot of capital sitting around as cash waiting to be released back into the economy.
Is it just me? (Score:1)
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It sounds like a competing product to OnStar.
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"You'll be shocked" (Score:2)
You'll be shocked to hear this, but Volvo thinks that self-driving vehicles will be safer than today's human-piloted models.
I am a little unclear what I will be shocked by. Or was that US "sarcasm"?
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They do have sarcasm you know. It's irony they get confused by. i have from a reliable source the last occurrence of irony was in 1983.
Geely (Score:2)
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Geely is going to fold both Volvo Cars and Polestar into itself with a complete merger later this year. They will all be just Geely then.
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Billion dollars per town? [citation needed] Really, that sounds absurd, like professional-stock-shorter pull-numbers-out-of-my-ass level of absurdity.
Once the data is collected there is only the updates for traffic revisions that need to be added for future maintenance. You won't need to do a survey of each town for each vehicle, or even each manufacturer. They've already **got** the data, it just needs a subset to be fed into the vehicle's AI at the appropriate time and that's not expensive at all, esp
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Not new, but I'd pay 25k rather than 15k for a 5-10 year old car in good shape.
I'd drive it myself for the times I leave the greater metro.
I'm sure there's other people that would happily do the same for other metros.
Robo-deathtrap (Score:2)
Blah blah blah (Score:2)
"Through our strategic partnership, we will first work together to integrate the Waymo Driver into an all-new mobility-focused electric-vehicle platform for ride-hailing services,"
You know the product will be crap, or late, or both when they resort to buzzword bingo
Why on earth can't they simple write: We're using Waymo tech in our latest electric cars. It's gonna be awesome.