Sterling Anderson, General Motors Co.’s (NYSE:GM) Chief Product Officer and former Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) Director of the Autopilot system, dismissed a vision-only approach to self-driving, citing limitations of the technology when compared with radar- and LiDAR-based systems.
GM’s Road-Specific Approach
Anderson, during an interview with The Verge on Tuesday, was asked about his views on self-driving technology and GM’s progress towards eyes-off autonomy. “We are designing them such that should they fall asleep, it won’t be unsafe, because we don’t have the luxury of ensuring that they’re paying attention,” Anderson said.
He then slammed the use of terms like eyes-off systems, which describe “nonsensical levels of automation.” Anderson outlined that if GM were to “design an autonomous system, we’re going to actually design an autonomous system.”
Anderson also said that GM’s way of handing back control to the driver would be different and that it would not hand over control to a driver in a safety-critical situation. “It’s just not reasonable to do that,” he said, touting a road-specific approach to self-driving instead.
“In the same way you put a robotaxi in a bounded region, we will put personally owned autonomous vehicles on a particular road,” he then said that GM will give drivers a “graceful countdown” of a particular amount of time to ask the driver to take over control.
If the driver does not take over by the end of the countdown, Anderson said that GM would bring the “vehicle to a safe state off the off-ramp,” and ask the driver to drive.
Camera-Only Approach Is ‘Weird’
Anderson was asked about his views on a camera-only approach to self-driving. “If you scale back to vision-only, physics suggests you’ll be in trouble in certain situations,” he said. He added that Radar systems were “so cheap” that it did not make sense to omit them.
“Dropping it is a weird religious stance that ignores physics,” he said. “Lidar operates on a similar wavelength to visible light and helps co-train camera systems to get better faster,” Anderson outlined, saying that cameras often struggle in poor visibility conditions.
“Having a multisensor suite provides obvious safety advantages that physics simply demands,” he said in the interview, backing a self-driving system that uses multiple sensor inputs.
Notably, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been a vocal advocate of a vision-only approach to self-driving vehicles, with Tesla’s Full-Self Driving (FSD) system incorporating only cameras in its suite, as opposed to companies like Alphabet Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Waymo, which also uses LiDAR sensors in its Robotaxis.
Price Action: GM shares were up 0.24% to $82.68 during pre-market trading on Thursday.
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