General Motors’ Cruise to Deploy Fully Driverless Cars in San Francisco

Cruise's self-driving cars have been allowed on California public streets for several years with humans poised behind the wheel to take over in an emergency.

General Motors’ Cruise to Deploy Fully Driverless Cars in San Francisco

Photo Credit: Twitter/ Cruise

GM-owned Cruise received California's permission to fully driverless cars in the state two months ago

Highlights
  • GM bought Cruise in 2016
  • Three other companies have California permits to operate driverless cars
  • They are AutoX Technologies, delivery service Nuro, and Amazon's Zoox
Advertisement

General Motors' self-driving car company is sending vehicles without anybody behind the wheel in San Francisco as it navigates its way toward launching a robotic taxi service that would compete against Uber and Lyft in the hometown of the leading ride-hailing services.

The move announced Wednesday by GM-owned Cruise come two months after the company received California's permission to fully driverless cars in the state.

Like dozens of other companies testing the robotic technology, Cruise's self-driving cars have been allowed on California public streets for several years with humans poised behind the wheel to take over in an emergency. Now, Cruise is confident enough to send out its self-driving cars without that safety net, instead monitoring from remote locations and, at least initially, having a company employee sitting in the front passenger seat. That employee won't have access to the same controls as a backup driver and eventually won't be sitting in front, according to the company.

“You're seeing fully driverless technology out of the (research and development) phase and into the beginning of the journey to being a real commercial product," Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said Wednesday.

California regulators also recently approved new rules allowing ride-hailing services to pick up passengers in self-driving cars, but Cruise isn't going down that road yet.

Instead, Ammann pledged the company will move cautiously while dispatching up to five fully driverless cars into parts of San Francisco initially. Cruise's employees most likely will be the only passengers initially riding in the fully driverless cars, just as they were when the company was testing the vehicles with a human backup behind the wheel.

Ammann declined to provide a timeline when asked if Cruise planned to use its driverless cars in ride-hailing service within San Francisco next year.

Cruise, which GM bought in 2016, had initially set a goal of using driverless cars in a ride-hailing service by the end of last year, but perfecting the required technology has proven far more challenging than some of the world's top robotic engineers envisioned when they working on their driverless technology anywhere from five to 10 years ago.

Waymo, a self-driving car pioneer spun out of a Google project, also has had to move more slowly with a robotic ride-hailing service it launched in the Phoenix area two years ago. That service, though, has been able to steadily expand since its debut, and Waymo also has a permit to deploy fully driverless cars in California, although the company hasn't yet indicated when it might do that.

Three other companies have California permits to operate fully driverless cars in the state: AutoX Technologies, delivery service Nuro, and Amazon's Zoox, which recently posted a video promoting a December 14 announcement about its future direction.

Cruise has spent the past five years testing its technology that has been used in 2 million miles of self-driving to reach this point in its evolution.


Are Micromax In 1b, In Note 1 good enough to take the brand to the top in India?? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.

Affiliate links may be automatically generated - see our ethics statement for details.
Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.

Further reading: GM, Cruise, self driving car, Dan Ammann
Netflix India Reveals Most Popular Movies, Series in 2020
Samsung Galaxy F62 Images Allegedly Leak; Could Be Called Galaxy E62
Share on Facebook Gadgets360 Twitter Share Tweet Snapchat Share Reddit Comment google-newsGoogle News
 
 

Advertisement

Follow Us

Advertisement

© Copyright Red Pixels Ventures Limited 2024. All rights reserved.
Trending Products »
Latest Tech News »