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Cruise vehicles with trained safety drivers will be mapping the streets of multiple cities soon, but driverless rides are not available at this time. Before welcoming riders, our operations teams complete a suite of comprehensive safety measures. The company is expected to have 30 electric vehicles in its fleet, offering its ride-hailing passengers paid rides. Those cars aren't allowed to operate on highways, however, or during times of heavy fog and rain. In its announcement, the company said it will begin rolling out fared rides gradually, including to areas not currently covered by its permit. Cruise’s first human-less deployment comes about a week after GM CEO Mary Barra said the company is confident that Cruise will begin commercial driverless ride-hailing and delivery operations by next year.
What’s inside the car
The company called this development a "major milestone for the shared mission of the AV industry to improve life in [the] cities." It will also use this opportunity to gather data for the development of the project's future phases. GM's Cruise has received the first ever driverless deployment permit issued by the California Public Utilities Commission. That means the company can now charge for the robotaxi rides, ones with no safety driver behind the wheel, it gives to members of the public. Cruise has secured permission (PDF) to operate its paid passenger service at a max speed of 30 mph on select streets of San Francisco from 10PM to 6AM.
Our services
At one point, the company had a goal to launch it in 2019, and it first began testing driverless cars in San Francisco in 2020. But Cruise isn’t the only company building fully driverless robotaxi services. Google spinoff Waymo, for example, is testing driverless rides in San Francisco and offers its Waymo One autonomous vehicle service in Arizona. And Argo AI, which is backed by Ford and Volkswagen, just announced that it’s testing fully driverless vehicles in Miami, Florida, and Austin, Texas. California is ground zero for AV testing in the US, with over 50 companies licensed to operate autonomous vehicles for testing purposes in the state.
Here’s how to get robotaxi rides in San Francisco—and what it will cost
Terrible experience overall and will definitely avoid using Cruise in the future. I’m sure they’ll figure it out eventually but the current cost does not justify the hassle. However, it is unclear when, exactly, the company plans to roll out the extended service hours that are now allowed and how quickly Cruise will add people off of the waitlist. Elshenawy heads the biggest team at Cruise and oversees the work of some 1,700 engineers tasked with developing every aspect of self-driving tech. The expertise on his team ranges from AI, robotics, and product engineering to mapping, safety, and hardware. In this period, many startups ran out of money and hit the wall on technological development, thinning a herd of self-driving players that once powered the automotive industry's hype machine.
It's the first company to receive permission from the California Public Utilities Commission.
The launch comes a few weeks after reports that the self-driving cars were causing a backup on a busy Montrose roadway triggered by malfunctioning traffic lights. In September, some of those autonomous cars caused another major traffic jam in Austin. 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.
Cruise will also only be able to offer the rides if weather conditions don’t include “heavy rain, heavy fog, heavy smoke, hail, sleet, or snow,” per a CPUC press release. The company will begin offering its paid rides “gradually” in the city, Cruise COO Gil West says in a blog post. But while Cruise was approved to give rides in its fully driverless vehicles without safety drivers, Waymo only is allowed to deploy its autonomous vehicles with a human monitor behind the wheel. In order to give rides to paying passengers in its fully driverless vehicles, as it does in Arizona, the Google spinoff would need to apply for an additional permit from the California Public Utilities Commission.
At this stage, no autonomous systems are engaged and the vehicles will not carry public passengers. At the start of this year, Cruise began piloting fully driverless taxis — without a safety driver behind the wheel — in a major urban environment for members of the public. After about four months of a nighttime pilot program on the streets of San Francisco, Cruise in June won approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to charge for its driverless rides. Last year, the CPUC approved two new programs to allow permitted companies to provide and charge for shared rides in autonomous vehicles as long as they can navigate the lengthy regulatory process. The decision came after months of lobbying by the AV industry pushing the CPUC to consider a rule change that would allow for operators to charge a fare and offer shared rides in driverless vehicles. Initially, Cruise’s driverless autonomous offering will operate only between 10 p.m.
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Cruise rolls out self-driving car service in Houston - InnovationMap
Cruise rolls out self-driving car service in Houston.
Posted: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The company said that fared driverless rides are currently taking place with “most riders” in the Northwest section of San Francisco. Cruise will continue “expanding our paid service in alignment with the smoothest customer experience possible,” a spokesperson said. With Cruise beginning to offer rides to the masses, Zhang has the critical task of overseeing safety and validation of the startup's driverless fleet. She has an instrumental role in every phase of development for Cruise's vehicles from design to testing to commercial deployment. “In order to launch a commercial service for passengers here in the state of California, you need both the California DMV and the California PUC to issue deployment permits.
Technology
We’ve made significant progress, guided by new company leadership, recommendations from third-party experts, and a focus on a close partnership with the communities in which our vehicles operate. The final step with the DMV, which only Nuro has achieved, is a deployment permit. Nuro’s vehicles can’t hold passengers, just cargo, which allows the company to bypass the CPUC permitting process.
The company began charging for rides in its self-driving taxis in San Francisco this week, marking an important milestone for the company’s plans to expand its service. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted Thursday to award Cruise with a driverless deployment permit, the final hurdle the company needed to jump to begin operating its autonomous ride-hail service commercially. A driverless ride hailing service is launching operations Thursday in Houston, where residents in select locations can start catching autonomous rides at 9 p.m. Employees of Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of General Motors, will be the first to jump inside one of the company’s autonomous vehicles that operate in San Francisco without a human driver in the front seat. Certain members of the public will also be able to ride, but they won’t be charged a fare.
In the past several years, Cruise has grown its team from around 40 employees, when GM acquired it in 2016, to 1,800 at the start of this year. GM-built electric Origin vehicles are to join Cruise's fleet by 2023. Prior to Cruise, Luo served as COO of DeepMap, a software company, where she worked on the self-driving-mapping company's go-to market strategy. Luo is an executive focused on the big picture for Cruise as it moves closer to commercialization. Some of her work includes collaborating with leadership to set clear long-term goals for scaling and expanding the business while helping teams across the company work efficiently to meet those marks.
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. Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that would require AV companies to only use electric vehicles starting in 2030. The company had planned to launch a commercial robotaxi service in San Francisco in 2019 but failed to do so, and it has yet to publicly commit to a new date.
The company would not be more specific about how long San Franciscans should expect to wait for access. Note that members of the press or government employees are not allowed to sign up. General Motors-backed Cruise operates some 400 cars in its fleet—they’re practically everywhere in San Francisco. Cruise co-founder, CTO and president Kyle Vogt was reportedly the first to ride the driverless AV, and he gushed about it all over Twitter.
“In the coming months, we’ll expand our operating domain, our hours of operation and our ability to charge members of the public for driverless rides until we have fared rides 24/7 across the entire city,” a spokesperson for Cruise told TechCrunch. "In the coming months, we'll expand our operating domain, our hours of operation and our ability to charge members of the public for driverless rides until we have fared rides 24/7 across the entire city." The CPUC said Cruise, along with any other company that eventually participates in the pilot, must submit quarterly reports about the operation of their vehicles providing driverless AV passenger service. Companies must also submit a passenger safety plan that outlines their plans for protecting passenger safety for driverless operations. Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company backed by General Motors, is now officially a commercial service.
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