Cruise is now testing fully driverless cars in San Francisco

Table Of Content

• The GM-backed company is one of the first to launch Level 4 vehicles in a dense, complex urban setting
• Lucid slashes prices for its luxury EVs for the third time in seven months
• The Origin is the GM subsidiary’s first attempt to build an fully autonomous car from the ground up
• G.M.’s Cruise Moved Fast in the Driverless Race. It Got Ugly.
• Suspension of operations

In early August, the company expanded its radius in the Phoenix area by 20x to include Tempe and Scottsdale. For “power users” initially, and then will roll out to members of the general public. In the week that followed, Cruise vehicles were involved in a series of incidents, including 10 robotaxis stalling and causing gridlock, a vehicle that drove into wet cement, and a crash with a fire truck that left a passenger injured. As a result, the California Department of Motor Vehicles requested that Cruise immediately reduce its robotaxi fleet by 50% in San Francisco while it conducts an investigation into the company. Vogt also said the novelty of the technology is why the media covers Cruise’s vehicles differently than they do with human-driven cars.

GM scales back Cruise after self-driving car setbacks - Marketplace

GM scales back Cruise after self-driving car setbacks.

Posted: Mon, 04 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

The GM-backed company is one of the first to launch Level 4 vehicles in a dense, complex urban setting

We are committed to safely deploying our technology in close collaboration with officials and communities at every step. We believe driverless technology has the potential to save lives, enhance access and improve communities. Since becoming part of General Motors in March 2016,[17] Cruise has been working on developing software and hardware to make fully autonomous vehicles using modified Chevrolet Bolts. Last week, Cruise finished its preliminary testing of driverless cars in Charlotte and began initial tests in Raleigh. Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of General Motors, said Monday it has begun manual data collection in Seattle and Washington, DC, the first step toward launching commercial services in the cities. On Monday, Cruise said it planned to begin deploying a limited number of its Origin vehicles for ride-hail services in Dubai from 2023, its first overseas commercial service.

Lucid slashes prices for its luxury EVs for the third time in seven months

Eventually, Cruise drops the human driver and tests the vehicles autonomously. A ride-hailing service will then become available first to employees and then to customers who have signed up for the service. The service area and hours of operation usually start on a limited basis, often at night, and slowly expand. The company’s main operations were historically based in San Francisco, but Cruise lost its permits to operate there following the accident.

The Origin is the GM subsidiary’s first attempt to build an fully autonomous car from the ground up

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. By Andrew J. Hawkins, transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. Additionally, many of the collisions our AVs did encounter were at low speeds and were not caused by our AVs’ driving behavior. We are incredibly proud of the many technical innovations developed at Cruise that made this achievement possible, but we aren’t satisfied with just building great technology.

Only 1 collision in 1,000,000 driverless miles resulted in a reported injury. This particular collision took place while our AV was making an unprotected left turn. At the time of collision, the other party was driving straight in a turn-only lane, and was traveling at more than 40 mph on a road with a posted speed limit of 25 mph. Although the police assigned responsibility for this incident to the other driver, Cruise chose to improve its software to avoid recurrence of this one-time event by building in additional defensive driving behaviors. We issued a voluntary recall to notify regulators and the public of this change.

“We’re at a unique moment in time, where anything an AV does, even if it is awkward or something interesting or ... Maybe a human wouldn’t do it exactly that way, it becomes a national headline,” he said. Cruise first unveiled the Origin robotaxi in early 2020 as a bus-like vehicle built for the sole purpose of shuttling people around in a city autonomously.

Driving cities forward

The push for not-car-ness is evident in Cruise’s intense marketing campaign leading up to the unveiling of the Origin. Cruise says it wants to “move beyond the car,” but I’m not convinced the absence of certain controls negates its inherent car-ness. As Vogt points out, it occupies the same amount of space as an SUV, and Cruise claims it can travel at normal city speeds. It is a car-like shape and does car-type things, like traveling down a road with people in it.

Suspension of operations

We’re expecting that number to double by mid 2023 and continue to scale exponentially as our fleet grows in the coming years. Throughout Cruise’s history we’ve accomplished many milestones while inventing the technical playbook for urban Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Back in November 2021, we were the first company to complete a fully driverless ride in a major US city. Since then, we launched the first paid driverless robotaxi service in San Francisco. Cruise’s initial response to the October crash suggested it was a freak incident—one unavoidable by even a human driver.

Cruise’s Safety Record Over 1 Million Driverless Miles

Cruise has a strong history in Phoenix and it is home to a large number of Cruise employees. It’s a city that supports AV and transportation innovation, and Phoenix leaders strive to ensure the metro area is an incubator for advanced technology. We plan to expand this effort to other select cities as we continue to engage with officials and community leaders. Cruise cars consider multiple paths per second, constantly choosing the best ones for unexpected events and changes in road conditions. Learn the basics of how a Cruise car navigates city streets safely and efficiently.

A few days later, the company said it would pause driverless operations across the US, in cities including Austin, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona. Seattle and DC are two out of 16 total cities in which Cruise is either mapping, testing or deploying its self-driving cars. Cruise’s formula for rollouts typically starts with entering a new market with test vehicles to collect data and map, followed by AV testing with a human driver in the front seat.

Inside are two bench seats facing each other, a pair of screens on either end... The absence of all the stuff you expect to see when climbing into a vehicle is jarring. 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. Founded in 2013, Cruise makes self-driving cars that have the potential to save millions of lives, reshape our cities, give people more spare time, and restore freedom of movement for many. We are incredibly grateful to the many members of our community who have collaborated with us to get this far.

We look forward to bringing our safe, clean, and accessible AVs to all the cities and communities that welcome the driverless revolution. In addition to the safety record detailed above, a closer look at the collisions we encountered shows that many of our collisions were at low speeds and were not caused by our AVs’ driving behavior. Our goal is to earn trust and build partnerships with the communities such that, ultimately, we resume fully driverless operations in collaboration with a city. We’re working to bring new transportation options that work for you and your community. This weekend, he logged onto the message board Hacker News, operated by legendary startup incubator Ycombinator, to clarify a statistic that appeared in a blistering New York Times story that alleged culture and tech problems at the self-driving developer.

This virtuous technology cycle has allowed us to safely and quickly scale our operating fleet in San Francisco. Our most recent 100,000 fully driverless miles were collected 7 times faster than our first 100,000 driverless miles. I couldn’t be prouder of the work the entire Cruise team has put into building this technology stack and achieving this momentous technical feat.

And if there isn’t another good name for it — “the property” notwithstanding — then “car” will have to do. We decided to approach some of the most respected transportation research institutions in the country to help us create better statistics. We partnered with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) to develop a multi-year study of naturalistic human ridehail driving collecting over 5.6 million miles of data in San Francisco. To put this into context, the COVID-19 global pandemic killed nearly 7 million people in just over 3 years and threatened to shut down the whole world. Over a similar time span, nearly 4 million people will have died in car accidents; and yet, we have collectively become desensitized to the carnage on our roads. We didn’t arrive at this moment without challenges, obstacles, and public scrutiny—and we’ll certainly see more of that as the next chapter of the AV playbook is written.