General Motors stated it has finished production of 130 self-driving Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles at its Orion assembly plant located in Michigan.
The automaker anticipates to deploy the cars within the month in San Francisco and Scottsdale, Arizona, in collaboration with its ride-sharing affiliate Lyft Inc, following final test in Michigan, according to the company.
GM starting producing the Bolt test cars at the Orion plant this year in January, and expects the self-driving test fleet to grow to 180.
Detroit-based GM is part of a list of companies aggressively pursuing automated vehicle technologies. These consist of Ford Motor, Uber, Tesla and Alphabet’s self-driving vehicle Waymo unit.
GM initially indicated its interest in self-driving automobiles back in 2015 when it began testing the tech on a few Chevy Volts. However it wasn’t until the company invested $500 million in Lyft (and the subsequent acquisition of Cruise) that it began talking up an ambitious goal of establishing a fleet of for-hire robotic cars. Since then, the automaker’s been progressively revealing more about the project, consisting of control panel video footage of the first-generation tests.
Apart from some spy shots, though, this is the very first official look GM’s provided of the Bolt’s new package of sensors. They’re fitted with the normal stuff like LIDAR and electronic cameras, but automaker’s not saying a lot more apart from that.
