General Motors will more than triple the number of self-driving vehicles it has operating on public roads within a matter of weeks, giving its engineers one of the largest autonomous test fleets of any company developing the fledgling technology.
Executives said this week that they have completed production of 130 autonomous electric Chevrolet Bolt EV cars at an assembly plant in Orion Township, Michigan, a process that began in January. They?re the first automated cars to be entirely produced on an assembly line in a traditional factory.
Destined for use in pilot projects already underway in San Francisco, Arizona, and Michigan, the Bolts will join GM?s original 50 autonomous vehicles to create a fleet of 180, a size that should help the company?s efforts to ramp up testing and data gathering.
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?To achieve what we want from self-driving cars,

we must deploy them at scale.?
? Kyle Vogt, Cruise Automation
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?To achieve what we want from self-driving cars, we must deploy them at scale,? said Kyle Vogt, chief executive officer of Cruise Automation, a self-driving-software company that GM bought for $1 billion in 2016.
At least for now, the influx means General Motors operates one of the largest autonomous fleets in the world. Waymo, the company culled from Google’s self-driving-car project, added 100 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans to a fleet that numbered “nearly 60” in December. The active number of cars in Waymo’s fleet is evolving, as the ...