Less than a week after Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed into law the nation’s most lax autonomous vehicle requirements, General Motors actually revealed its strategies to not only test driverless vehicles in the state, but produce them here too. According to General Motors and reported here in October of 2015, the General’s autonomous automobiles are already drifting around Michigan, at the automaker’s historic Warren Technical Center. The new Michigan law is letting the automaker broaden beyond Warren, initially to the outlying roads, then to the more comprehensive metro location.
However to be reasonable, we anticipated something like this following earlier announcement. Another big news is that General Motors will develop autonomous test cars not in some special facility, but at one of its regular manufacturing plants. That advantage goes to General Motor’s Orion Assembly, about an hour north of the automaker’s Renaissance Center HQ.
The center is presently responsible for Bolt EV production, making it a natural site for screwing together a restricted test fleet of autonomous variants of the brand-new electrical car. The autonomous Bolts will depend on “LIDAR, cameras, sensing units and other hardware created to guarantee system safety, leveraging General Motor’s tested manufacturing quality requirements.” The Orion Township plant will begin cranking out autonomous Bolts in 2017.
“Reinventing transportation for our customers while enhancing safety on road is the goal of our autonomous vehicle technology, and today’s announcement gets us one step better to making this vision a reality,” General Motors CEO Mary Barra stated. “Our autonomous technology will be reputable and safe, as consumers have come to anticipate from any of our vehicles.”
