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Robotaxi By Cruise Premieres in Austin, Texas
Although other companies have made use of the "robotaxi" idea label (see Elon Musk: Production Of Robotaxis In 2024 and Tesla Robotaxis Will Automatically Recharge Themselves), Cruise is actively offering their service.
Last night, @cruise launched their self-driving (NO humans in the car!) taxi service in downtown Austin, TX 🤠
— Sahil Chaturvedi (@SahilC0) December 22, 2022
I was lucky to be able to try it out! Here's my first impression.
Watch me giggle like a maniac around 4:01 🤣 👇 https://t.co/239E4E4RsI pic.twitter.com/RGNwFvcOfX
Developing an urban fleet of fully autonomous vehicles is an incredible challenge. To be successful, we needed to build both the AV tech that’s out on the road and the ecosystem of tools our engineers use internally.
(Cruise)In creating this cycle, we thought carefully about how to best empower our engineers. Home-grown technology chains like this can get unwieldy quickly — the last thing you want as an engineer is to fight the disparate tools you are using or jump across too many of them to get your daily work done. Google Cloud has been a useful tool for us as we worked to streamline and support this development cycle, adapt our cloud-first infrastructure strategy, and seamlessly scale our systems. The frameworks we use in the vehicle, data logging, visualization, data mining, and ML modeling are all built on top of a common foundation that makes going from road to code — and from code to road — fast and safe.
(Via Cruise.)
As far as I know, the first use of the portmanteau word "robotaxi" occurred in Dugal Was A Spaceman by Joe Gibson, published by Science Fiction Quarterly in 1953:
The trance persisted as he settled back in a robotaxi and the brilliant lights of the streets flashed past.
See variations on this idea in Larry Niven's bubble cars from World out of Time (1976) or the tin cabbie from James Blish's 1957 novel Cities in Flight. A more recent take can be found in Alan Dean Foster's 2006 novel Sagramanda; see the automated taxi. Also, see the automatic automobile from David H. Keller's 1935 story The Living Machine and the aircab from the 1955 novel Time Crime by H. Beam Piper.
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