Cruise Autonomous Taxi (Chevrolet Bolt) review: These cars will do me out of a job
Autonomous vehicles aren’t just a fluffy tech-bro PR stunt: self-driving taxis are operating in San Francisco. Thank you all, dear readers. It’s been fun.
Being a humble fellow, I rarely compare myself to a horse, but I really did feel like one, and not just because I had a long face, as I watched the technology that will surely replace me zipping around the streets of San Francisco.
I mean, imagine what it felt like for horses when they saw the first cars and it dawned on them that, other than really tiny people with a fondness for bright silky shirts, humans just wouldn’t need them any more.
Confronted with cars that actually, genuinely drive themselves, in the real world with real traffic, as I was in San Francisco, a little clock immediately started ticking in my head. I mean really, how many times will I be able to write a story about what it’s like not to drive a motor vehicle? Well, at least this once.
While the rest of the world ponders whether autonomous vehicles will ever catch on, San Francisco is just getting on with it (and if you think it seems like some kind of fluffy Silicone Valley tech-bro PR stunt, keep in mind that this is the town where Uber was born, in 2009).
There are two different companies offering rides in self-driven taxis around large swathes of the city (although not all of it), with Waymo One, owned by Alphabet, Google’s partner company, using a fleet of fully electric Jaguar I-Paces, and Cruise, owned by General Motors, using an AV (that’s Autonomous Vehicle) based on the Chevrolet Bolt EV.
You might imagine this is being done on a small basis, but Cruise says it has 242 currently operating AVs and regularly conducts 1000 driverless trips a day. Despite this, it still took me 15 hours to catch one (I am nothing if not cussedly determined), thanks to the fact that the Apple App Store seems to have a very nativist approach to foreign invaders.
In the end, I befriended a hotel door man, Rick, with an American phone, and he eventually ripped off his suit, became my personal Porsche-piloting super hero (even doormen have Cayennes in America), and drove me around San Francisco at midnight until I found a Cruise robotaxi that would have me. We high-fived each other as he used his iPhone to unlock the door of my self-driving car – complete with a steering wheel that moves itself, an inclusion that I found made me feel more uneasy – and I set off into the night.
I must say it’s brave of Cruise to run these cars around in the wee small hours – at one stage there were four cars on the road around me, all of them robotaxis – when they are going to be filled with drunk people (not to mention stoned ones; I tried to interview one guy as he was jumping into a Cruise, but he smelled like a Grateful Dead concert and was far too chirpy for my liking, although he did say he’d been using autonomous taxis for a year and loved them, man).
But it was also brave of me to get in one, because the experience was supra surreal. Watching the little Cruise – mine was called “Cosmos” and I followed another one called “Spatula” – constantly adjusting its steering wheel to keep away from parked cars, I was struck by just how hard its little computer brain was working.
While I’m in the process of teaching my son to drive, I’m particularly aware of just how much there is to learn when it comes to navigating city streets, and what a 360-degree perspective it requires.
Making it even harder for the robotaxi is that lots of people apparently throw themselves into the road in front of them, “just to see if they’ll stop”. Honestly, if AI taxis do become self aware they’re going to think humans are pathetically stupid.
So far, no one has been seriously injured by Cruise or Waymo, but concerns have been raised by the San Francisco fire chief about autonomous vehicles blocking access to incidents. And there was a case where a Cruise taxi appeared to idle in the midst of a mass shooting for several minutes in early June, which is an absurdly American anecdote.
Personally, during my ride, my brain leapt between being scared – at one stage the car changed lanes and accelerated suddenly and I yelled at it in fear, then realised how pointless that was – and impressed; the robotaxi managed to negotiate a four-way Stop intersection, which I’m not very good at.
The geeky part of my brain was thrilled to bits by how clever it all was, but the journalist part was wetting itself over the thought that autonomous cars are going to be about as interesting to review as trains or buses.
For the sake of scientific comparison, I got a human-driven Uber back to the hotel, and it cost twice as much as the Cruise one, and I got less conversation out of the driver (his opinion on robotaxis was a single word, “isbad”).
The most striking thing about the experience was that, after as little as 20 minutes, it just felt so normal, almost inevitable. I used the seat back screens to play pub trivia, and clapped a little when the car slammed on the brakes in plenty of time for a yellow light.
The idea of robotaxis might seem impossibly futuristic, but in San Francisco that far-fetched future is already here. And I’ll happily go out on a limb and say we’ll all be riding in self-driving cars within the decade. So thank you all, dear readers. It’s been fun.
-
Cruise Autonomous Taxi (Chevrolet Bolt)
Engine: Single permanent magnet motor (149kW, 340Nm)
Fuel economy: 17.6kWh per 100km
Transmission: One-speed automatic, front-wheel drive
Price: $22 for a 25-minute ride
Rating: Four out of five stars
