The Verge:

The not-a-car sits on the gleaming black stage surrounded by a halo of light. It’s orange and black and white, and roughly the same size as a crossover SUV, but somehow looks much larger from the outside. There is no obvious front to the vehicle, no hood, no driver or passenger side windows, no side-view mirrors. The symmetry of the exterior is oddly comforting.

I don’t find the symmetry “oddly comforting.” Frankly I think the vehicle, even absent its external sensors, butt ugly.

Its official name is “Origin,” and Kyle Vogt, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Cruise, is clearly excited to be showing it off.

Inside are two bench seats facing each other, a pair of screens on either end… and nothing else. No steering wheel, no pedals, no gear shift, no cockpit to speak of, no obvious way for a human to take control should anything go wrong.

“I guess it’s important to note that we haven’t validated and released our technology yet,” he says. “But we’re getting pretty close. By the time this vehicle goes into production, we think the core software that drives our AVs will be at a superhuman level of performance and safer than the average human driver,” he says. “And we’ll be providing hard empirical evidence to back up that claim before we put people in a car without someone in it.”

And there’s the rub. This thing isn’t even close to being ready for production, let alone being allowed on the streets of our cities. Even when/if that happens, if it is indeed built “around the idea of not having a driver and specifically being used in a ride-share fleet,” it’s going to be a failure. How many users of Lyft or Uber want to share a ride? If they don’t, then all that glorious space inside is wasted on just one or two passengers at a time.

There’s been a lot of press/hype about this vehicle over the past couple of days as the media who were blessed with rides and interviews get their articles out. But there’s not nearly enough skepticism, healthy or otherwise, around this particular implementation.