Cruise Origin reimagines the driverless car as a spacious box made for ride-sharing

While everyone is stuck in traffic, trapped in the driver seat, banging their head against the steering wheel during the frustrating evening commute, autonomous vehicle company Cruise envisions a serene, shared, comfortable experience for riders in its new robo-taxi vehicle. Some yoga maybe? 

The Cruise Origin is the brainchild of Cruise, its parent company General Motors, and investor-partner Honda. It’s an all-electric six-seater box of a car with no steering wheel, pedals, or any of the usual driver seat buttons and knobs. It’s actually really hard to tell which side is the front without the steering wheel. Screens inside the car inform passengers what’s going on and who is getting picked up and dropped off.

“This is the end of the human-driver gasoline-powered single-occupant car,” Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said at a big reveal party in San Francisco Tuesday night. 

Instead of owning your own gas-guzzling car, Cruise is building the Origin to order through a Cruise app, like a Lyft or Uber ride-share situation. The company estimates it’ll save you $5,000 a year to ride around in this car compared to own your car. “[The Origin] will spend most of its life in motion, working harder than your average car,” Ammann said.

The electric box car is touted to last for 1 million miles of driving during its lifespan. Cruise envisions it driving all day and all night for maximum efficiency and to help ease congestion.

It’s just a matter of when this car will actually hit the streets. When it does, it’ll be the first car in the next generation of cars produced as a true autonomous vehicle. As long as no one beats Cruise to it. 

Ammann said the Origin isn’t a concept car, but a production-ready car he hopes to have on the road as soon as possible. It’ll be made at a GM facility with more news about how it’s made coming soon. He wouldn’t share any actual details about timing or the battery capacity. 

“This is the end of the human-driver gasoline-powered single-occupant car”

It’s been three years to get to this point. Cruise is still testing its fleet of self-driving Chevy Bolts around San Francisco for a city-wide taxi service, but that’s yet to take off. Only Cruise employees can currently use the autonomous ride-sharing service to get around.

Cruise founder Kyle Vogt showed off some of the features, including thermal sensors to see in the dark along with other “superhuman” LiDAR light-measuring sensors and cameras. The car doors also slide open, so no more dooring bicyclists. 

The theme of the evening was spaciousness and the limited abilities of humans compared to machines. 

“Humans will never be able to reach this sensing capability,” Vogt said. He also suggested breaking out some yoga moves with all the legroom in the center of the vehicle even with six people inside.

GM director of design for advanced mobility Stuart Norris, who worked with the GM and Honda design and engineering teams, said knows the car looks bigger than it actually is. It’s because of its unusual layout with no driver seat. It’s actually shorter than a Chrysler Pacifica — the car of choice for many autonomous vehicle companies, like Waymo, to modify for self-driving. 

For Norris, the Origin’s aesthetics aren’t its main goal, though it leans heavily on Cruise’s very San Francisco colors: black, orange, and white. It’s supposed to be a car all about the user experience in that it’s intuitive to use and easy to trust. Never mind that it kind of looks like a monorail car that escaped the tracks.

But building a self-driving car from the ground up means it doesn’t have to force a driver-focused design to work in a totally new way. Regarding the Chevy Bolt cars Cruise is already testing, Norris said, “It’s clearly taking a vehicle that was never designed to be an autonomous vehicle.”

But the Origin is an autonomous vehicle through and through. There’s not even an option for a human to drive. 

Now everyone, pile in. We’re Cruising.