cruise automation san francisco reviews

Waymo vs. Cruise: Which handles San Francisco streets better?

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Much ado has been made of San Francisco’s major autonomous vehicle companies, Google-owned Waymo and General Motors-backed Cruise. But as regulators prepare to vote on the unlimited expansion of robotaxis in San Francisco, only a fairly limited subset of residents can say they’ve actually taken a ride in a self-driving car. 

The Standard wanted to know how these two Bay Area-based autonomous vehicle companies fared against each other in a ride from the city’s southern neighborhoods up to the tip of Pacific Heights. From car design to the feel of the ride to the names of the vehicles themselves, the two self-driving rides couldn’t be any more different.

The Slowest Race on Earth

It’s one thing for a robotaxi to get through an empty street; it’s another to ask it to navigate construction, pedestrians, bicyclists and Muni trains. We wanted to test the robotaxis’ ability to drive through multiple types of terrains and ordered routes from a Safeway in the Sunset—where construction has closed off lanes along Taraval Street—to Alta Plaza Park up in Pacific Heights. 

Cruise and Waymo offered very different routing options, with the Waymo choosing a more direct route along busier roadways and Cruise opting for a more circuitous route. 

The Standard’s ride with Cruise involved actually going in the opposite direction for a spell. It also started with a short walk. Instead of arriving at the Safeway, the Cruise app directed us to a pickup spot a couple blocks away on 19th Avenue. It pulled over on the busy street, leading to a few honks and dirty looks from frustrated drivers as we got situated in the vehicle. 

Instead of driving straight through Golden Gate Park, Cruise decided to go east on Lincoln Way before taking a strange southward sojourn on Stanyan Street, turning around in Cole Valley and heading back north. The full drive time from pickup to drop-off? Thirty-four minutes, nearly twice the time it would have taken in a personal vehicle. 

A Cruise spokesperson said vehicles attempt to “optimize for the safest route” based on factors like traffic, real-time feedback from the fleet, roadblocks and closures.

Riding in a Waymo felt almost like taking a normal Uber, awkward rideshare driver talk not included. It arrived right in front of the Safeway, took us on a slow and careful ride—not unlike driving with your grandmother—and felt surprisingly smooth for a robotaxi. The car made only one jerky turn and successfully passed a delivery truck stalled on Masonic Avenue. 

Waymo took The Standard on what appeared to be the most efficient driving route through congested roads such as 19th Avenue and Fulton Street along Golden Gate Park. 

“We are constantly evaluating and adjusting our dynamic routing to help riders safely and conveniently get where they’re going by balancing for road and traffic conditions,” Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli said in a statement. 

All told, from pickup to drop-off, the Waymo took roughly 27 minutes to drive from Taraval Street to Alta Plaza Park—roughly seven minutes slower than an average car or Uber driver, but certainly faster than public transit. 

But if you’re truly in a pinch, right now Cruise might offer a faster overall experience. Waymo’s cars feel like they drive faster and along a more direct route, but there appear to be far fewer of them circulating in the city, meaning wait times can stretch well past a half hour. 

Cruise’s relative ubiquity throughout San Francisco means most riders can get a ride within 10 minutes. Waymo, by comparison, took 20 minutes to arrive at the Safeway on Taraval Street.

Cars, Apps, Hardware and Games 

At first glance, Cruise cars are most readily identifiable, with their blood orange stripes and clunky rooftop robotaxi gear. They also all have cutesy names, often related to food. This time, we were riding in Banana. 

That fun aesthetic also filters into the actual riding experience: On the back of the seats are tablets that offer options to change the music and the mood, and riders are offered a number of trivia games about the music, movies, sports and sights of San Francisco. So if you’re trying to answer a question about Mrs. Doubtfire while in a self-driving car, you only really have one option. 

Waymo cars offer a slightly sleeker experience: Set in a mid-sized Jaguar SUV, the all-white car—sans cutesy name—blends in slightly better with other cars on the road and relies on minimal branding. The inside experience is less tailored toward games and trivia, but riders can use one of two middle consoles to control music, routing options and customer service. The free face masks, hand sanitizer and safety pamphlet were a nice touch. 

Waymo also feels less like a fish bowl: Their car’s windows appear slightly more tinted than Cruise windshields—a welcome reprieve from all the glares and honking coming from AV-opposed San Franciscans. 

The robotaxis’ design feels like a reflection of their divergent marketing strategies: Waymo looks and feels like a luxury car; Cruise, with its more light-hearted naming strategy and entertainment options, appears to be marketed towards a younger clientele. 

All car transit options—Ubers, taxis, Waymos and Cruises—charge roughly the same price for a ride. But public transportation via BART or Muni will always provide a cheaper route. Better yet, walking on foot is free. 

What’s Next? 

Autonomous vehicles are quite possibly San Francisco’s most controversial new technology. In recent months, robotaxis have prompted public outrage by interrupting public emergencies, rolling over a fire hose during a house blaze and, in another instance, narrowly missing a light-rail car. Another killed a small dog . A cohort of anti-autonomous vehicle activists in San Francisco has even taken to placing traffic cones on the hoods of Cruise and Waymo robotaxis to literally stop their progress.

READ MORE: We Spoke to One of the Activists ‘Coning’ Cruise and Waymo Robotaxis in San Francisco

It’s not uncommon to see drivers trying to speed past cautious Cruise cars and slow-going Waymos; many will honk at AVs that stall on the roads, and one of our reporters narrowly avoided getting hit by an angry driver during a Cruise ride this week. 

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has twice delayed a scheduled vote for unlimited expansion of Cruise and Waymo robotaxis in San Francisco amid growing opposition from local public officials and a rash of protests. The vote is currently slated for Aug. 10.

Editor’s note: The description of the types of names Cruise gives to its cars has been clarified.

Kevin Truong can be reached at [email protected]

Filed Under

Cruise: Driving the future of autonomous electric vehicles

Founded in 2013 in San Francisco, US, Cruise fulfils CEO Kyle Vogt ’s childhood dream of making self-driving cars a reality. Co-founded by Chief Product Officer Dan Kan , the company was acquired by General Motors in 2016 to bring more than a century of experience in designing and manufacturing vehicles to the autonomous vehicle (AV) effort.

Cruise has received $10B from well-respected companies and investors—including General Motors, Honda, Microsoft, T. Rowe Price, and Walmart—increasing its valuation 30x since being founded.

The Origin robotaxi — launched in early 2020 — is a bus-like vehicle built for the sole purpose of shuttling people around in a city autonomously.

In its first 15 months, Cruise AVs collectively drove one million driverless miles — a distance equivalent to more than 40 laps around the planet.

The fleet is all-electric, fuelled by electricity generated by solar panels, many in Californian farms as part of the Farm to Fleet programme that aims to bridge and boost transport and agriculture in the US, promoting renewable energy and increasing benefits for the companies. 

“The amount of development work to get from nothing to the level of performance to operate without a driver was enormous,” says Vogt.

“We still have a long way to go to generalise this, to make this work at massive scale everywhere. But the relative difficulty of that compared to doing the work that is already behind us is pretty small. And it’s do-able.

“We know what the bottlenecks are, like our mapping technology. If you told me tomorrow we needed to operate in 100 cities, we’d be in trouble. But we have a road map so that, by the time we are adding 20, 30 or 50 cities a year, the technology is there to support that.”

Boosting the community

In partnership with the National Federation of the Blind , Cruise is making cars that can be accessed independently by blind people, eliminating a critical accessibility barrier. 

During the height of the COVID-19 restrictions, Cruise repurposed its AV fleet to deliver meals to vulnerable people in the San Francisco area, alongside partnering with Walmart   on a self-driving delivery pilot in Arizona.

In partnership with nonprofits, the Cruise for Good programme is dedicated to providing at least 1% of the Cruise self-driving fleet to serving important community needs in every city, delivering meals and providing rides to vulnerable populations to build a more equitable transportation ecosystem.

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Cruise begins driverless testing in San Francisco

Cruise Automation, the autonomous vehicle subsidiary of GM that also has backing from SoftBank Vision Fund, Honda and T. Rowe Price & Associates, has started testing what it describes as fully driverless vehicles on public roads in San Francisco, the first milestone required to secure a permit to launch a shared, commercial service that can charge for rides.

Cruise CEO Dan Ammann, who took one of the company’s first driverless ride on public streets in San Francisco’s Sunset neighborhood, called it “wildly boring” and “a humble step” towards a commercial service.

“The ride itself was extremely natural and predictable, so it was kind of boring, but in all the right ways,” Ammann said in a call with reporters Wednesday. “And our goal is to make that same experience available to as many people as possible as soon and as safely as we can; and that could either be by taking a ride, or by getting say a self-driving delivery.”

The company released Wednesday a video of its first ride — with no human safety driver behind the wheel — in the Sunset neighborhood in San Francisco. There was a human safety operator in the vehicle, sitting in the passenger seat, the video shows.

Cruise’s testing of fully autonomous vehicles is in limited geographic area and in arguably one of San Francisco’s simpler environments; the video below shows the testing was conducted at night in a less congested part of San Francisco. However, it still marks progress by the company that had once aimed to launch a commercial service by the end of 2019 .

For some in the industry, the caveats of having a safety operator in the passenger seat and launching in an “easier” and small geofenced area matter. Cruise says this is just the beginning and that it will eventually expand its driverless testing area, adding in more complicated environments over time, as well as removing the safety operator from the vehicle.

“We recognize this is both a trust race as well as a tech race,” Cruise spokesperson Milin Mehta said in an email. “Given that, during the beginning of our use of this permit, we will maintain a safety operator in the passenger seat. The safety operator has the ability to bring the vehicle to a stop in the event of an emergency, but does not have access to standard driver controls. Eventually, this safety operator will be fully removed.”

Cruise started driverless testing in November with a dedicated fleet of five autonomous vehicles. The rest of Cruise’s fleet will be used to perform its regular testing with a human safety driver, some of which are used to deliver goods to area food banks.

The California DMV, the agency that regulates autonomous vehicle testing in the state, issued Cruise a permit in October that allows the company to test five autonomous vehicles without a driver behind the wheel on specified streets within San Francisco. Cruise has had a permit to test autonomous vehicles with safety drivers behind the wheel since 2015.

In February, Cruise received a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission allowing it to transport passengers in its autonomous vehicles in the state. However, it wasn’t until November that the CPUC modified its regulations to allow properly permitted companies the ability to charge for shared driverless rides. The bar to secure the permit is higher than it was before and includes a new government approval process that some in the industry have argued adds unnecessary bureaucracy that could delay deployments by more than two years.

Government process aside, Cruise has to show data that it tested driverless rides for a 30-day period before it can qualify for the CPUC permit, according to information on the CPUC website .

AutoX, Nuro, Waymo and Zoox also have driverless testing permits in California. Waymo has tested what it describes as fully autonomous mode on public roads in California without a human safety driver behind the wheel, but it has yet to remove the operator from the vehicle altogether.

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GM aims to speed up self-driving car development by buying Cruise Automation

By Chris Ziegler

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General Motors just announced that it is acquiring Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based autonomous driving startup founded in 2013. Cruise's West Coast office will remain open, GM says, serving as an R&D facility for self-driving technology while working in concert with engineers at GM's other facilities.

Cruise Automation's brief existence as an independent company has been an interesting one. A graduate of startup incubator Y Combinator, it originally set out to build a retrofit kit that would allow cars already in the market to drive on highways with a high level of autonomy, not unlike what Tesla currently offers with its Autopilot feature. (We even rode in a prototype of the retrofit kit, called RP-1, in 2014 .) But the $10,000 add-on — which would've required that buyers bolt a big, sensor-filled bar to the roof of their car — was probably always a tough sell, especially in light of the limitations: the kit was only compatible with a couple Audi models, and would initially only work on certain California highways. "A little over a year ago, we decided to pivot away from that when we discovered that fully driverless technology is a far larger business opportunity, and have been working on that quietly ever since," Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt tells me. More recently, Cruise was in the news when one of its development prototypes — a specially fitted Nissan Leaf — was involved in a minor crash in San Francisco during the transition from autonomous to manual control.

GM sees ride-sharing as the big opportunity for autonomous cars

For GM, the acquisition is the latest in a spree of tech-focused announcements and spending, culminating in a recent $500 million investment in Lyft and the launch of Maven , GM's own car-sharing service. As with Ford, GM hasn't been shy about trying to take the future of transportation head-on, even in ways that don't mesh well with the auto industry's traditional business model of selling as many cars as possible: ride-hailing and car-sharing services both seek to put fewer cars on the road, for instance. If legacy automakers are going to be disrupted, the popular saying goes, they want to be the ones doing the disrupting. And with tech giants like Uber and Google charging ahead, they'll need to move fast.

GM has positioned the Lyft investment as a way to get self-driving cabs on the road more quickly, and it seems that the Cruise deal is closely aligned with that goal. "We've been really clear that we see the first large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles being into a ride-share type of car, so we think that's the right first application," says GM President Dan Ammann. Consumer sales of autonomous cars would be "sometime after that," he says.

GM's Dan Ammann (right) poses with Cruise co-founders Daniel Kan and Kyle Vogt.

This isn't GM's first foray into autonomous driving, but it may not be as far along in the development process as it would like. It had originally intended to debut "Super Cruise," its highly automated highway driving feature, on Cadillac models this year — but it recently delayed that launch to 2017 . (Interestingly, Ammann tells me that the Cruise Automation acquisition will have "no impact" on the Super Cruise launch, though it stands to reason that the two development efforts would probably converge over time.) And GM product boss Mark Reuss has said on several occasions that he'd be open to partnering with outside firms to make self-driving cars happen. But when I ask Ammann about Reuss' comments, it sounds like the tune may be changing. "I think we have, between what Cruise brings to the table and all the capabilities we have inside of GM, we have a really strong position to rapidly commercialize this technology," Ammann tells me.

"We have a really strong position to rapidly commercialize this technology."

For now, though, we wait. Across the industry, development on self-driving tech is ongoing, and substantial challenges remain: automakers have only recently begun testing in inclement weather , for example, and the regulatory picture is still pretty murky . Beyond Ammann's optimism that this technology is going to be coming quickly, GM isn't making any specific comments today about the timeline.

Terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the second quarter, weren't disclosed, but Re/code reports that the acquisition cost GM "over $1 billion."

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Cruise Robotaxis Entering More Cities

Cruise has slowly been expanding its network of robotaxis and their availability in certain markets. Though, it’s been a long time since the company entered new cities … until now. Cruise is now coming to Houston and Dallas.

While Cruise vehicles will be fully self driving and operate even without safety drivers in other markets, for some period of time, they will include safety drivers in Dallas and Houston.

If you’re in one of the cities where Cruise operates — San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, Houston, or Phoenix — you can try to start using Cruise robotaxis by getting on the company’s waitlist . It’s not open to everyone yet.

We’ll start supervised driving in Houston in the coming days, with Dallas to follow shortly thereafter. Be sure to join our waitlist to be amongst the first to experience driverless rides: https://t.co/0d4QmeyRiV — cruise (@Cruise) May 10, 2023

Cruise’s progress has been a bit of a “two steps forward, one step backward” situation. Back in June of 2022, Cruise became the first robotaxi company to offer autonomous rides for a fare (not just for free), but a month later, it was making headlines for clogging up streets in San Francisco . Toward the end of 2022, Cruise expanded massively in the San Francisco region . In December, Cruise launched in Austin, Texas . (I actually snapped the pics of Cruise vehicles in Austin, above and below, in November as they were getting settled there.)

That was two steps forward, so we must be at one step back next, right? Indeed. “In January, San Francisco’s Transportation Authority asked regulators to  limit or temporarily pause Cruise and competitor Waymo’s expansion, citing repeated cases of their cars inexplicably stopping in traffic and blocking emergency vehicles,” Engadget reports. But that’s no reason to stop the fun train. “As of yet, things have done anything but slow down. Since the request, Cruise celebrated one million fully driverless miles  on top of making its  robotaxis available at all times in San Francisco — though full access is only for employees.”

Unfortunately, you can’t just grab a Cruise robotaxi in Houston and Dallas now. What we know is that it’s entering these markets, not when.

In case you haven’t been following along, Cruise robotaxis are considered Level 4 autonomous. They can operate 100% on their own within certain geographic boundaries or parameters. You can’t drop them in the desert and ask them to get you to the nearest Starbucks. (Well, I guess Phoenix is sort of the desert … but anyway.)

One thing that crossed my mind while uploading these pictures is that these robotaxis have been based on an electric car model that is being discontinued , the Chevy Bolt . What will Cruise turn to next? One possibility is the Cruise Origin , a robotaxi-tailored vehicle that’s been in development for years, first unveiled in January 2020 .

Aside from delivering humans to their desired destinations, Cruise is inching into the actual delivery business as well. “Cruise is also working on expansion of its autonomous vehicles into delivery services,” GM Authority writes. “Autonomous vehicle units equipped with a locker to securely carry groceries or other delivery payloads have been reported. Major retail chain Walmart is investing in the technology, with eight stores currently participating in testing.”

What’s next in Cruise news? We’ll see, and we’ll let you know.

Cruise aims to earn $1 billion in annual revenue by 2025. Can it do that?

On the technical side of things, you can explore Cruise’s April 2023 release notes here .

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After Cruise Ban, What’s Next for Autonomous Vehicles?

Fully autonomous vehicles encountered another roadblock after Cruise’s ban in San Francisco. Here’s what that could mean for the future of AVs and a potential path forward. 

The future of autonomous vehicles is at a crossroads. On Oct. 4,  Cruise, a robotaxi company that uses the electric Chevy Bolt outfitted with autonomous gear to transport passengers across San Francisco, was told to halt operations in the city immediately. This happened after a woman crossing a downtown street was struck by a hit-and-run driver and then pinned beneath one of Cruise’s autonomous vehicles. 

California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s permit to operate stating that its vehicles weren’t safe for public operation and that the company had misrepresented safety information . Days after the California ruling, Cruise announced its fleets in other U.S. cities would now be operated with human oversight.

This follows a troubling trend regarding autonomous vehicles. 

2 Types of Autonomous Vehicles

• Driver-assisted: These vehicles deploy autonomous vehicle technology to support the driver, using features like backup cameras, adaptive cruise control, lane-assist and assisted driving. 
• Fully autonomous: These are driverless vehicles that don’t use steering wheels or braking and acceleration pedals and are controlled solely by autonomous vehicle technology. 

But for every autonomous vehicle death, there are thousands more caused by our driving behaviors. The reality is that by changing our mindset about the development and oversight of driverless cars, we can dramatically reduce the overall number of deaths caused by traffic accidents.

What’s Preventing Autonomous Vehicle Growth?

We see the world through the lenses of our experiences. Usually, we get to where we’re going without accidents or close calls, even when we engage in risky behaviors like speeding or texting. Yes, it’s risky, but it’s the devil we know, and we’ve grown dependent on its benefits. Driving falls within our societal risk tolerance.

Statistics tell a different story. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that 42,795 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2022, according to its latest report . When it comes to driving safely, we simply aren’t that reliable.

Conversely, we’re often disproportionately frightened by crashes involving autonomous vehicles. We fear the unknown, and don’t understand the algorithms and decision-making capabilities of these “black boxes.”

Yet fully autonomous vehicles, or those without a steering wheel or braking and acceleration pedals, have the potential to save thousands of lives. With full implementation of driverless vehicles, some researchers estimate deaths could ultimately fall to 1 percent of current rates.

However, lawsuits and regulatory restrictions, such as the California DMV’s San Francisco prohibition, threaten to curtail these benefits by causing manufacturers to slow down driverless development in favor of driver-assisted technology. That puts responsibility on humans, not automation, which can be proven to cause far more deaths than driverless vehicles.

More on AI What Is Autonomous Trucking?

Why Driver-Assisted Vehicles Aren’t the Answer

The allure of driver-assisted technology is understandable. Driver-assist provides the gentle nudges we can appreciate, without giving up our sense of control. Few of us like to parallel park, so we gladly surrender that task. 

But human-assisted AV poses dynamic challenges, often causing the driver to over- or under-react. Under-reaction can happen through complacency; the driver trusting the autopilot “knows what it’s doing” and so the human doesn’t intervene until it’s too late, such as a malfunctioning adaptive cruise control.

An example of overreaction is when the driver is surprised by a driver-assist nudge and tries to bring the vehicle back to its intended course. For example, a driver who wants to change lanes but fails to signal. As the driver steers into the adjacent lane, the automation gently beeps or vibrates and directs the vehicle back in the original lane. The driver, not being familiar with the technology, turns the wheel even more aggressively until it overrides the automation feature. But depending on what level of override is allowed by the software, a human-automation tug-of-war may result. This can be physical, or cognitive, leading to a “What’s it doing now?” phenomenon. 

Driver-assisted autonomous vehicles aren’t a completely new phenomenon. It has parallels to the rise of autopilot in airplanes. The key to this evolution was the proficiency-based training all pilots are required to take and two reporting programs. Without fail, pilots must pass annual exams to demonstrate not only knowledge, skills, and abilities, but also to show proficiency in using the automation under different flight situations.

Meanwhile, the Aviation Safety Action Program and the Flight Operations Quality Assurance also collect both crew-informed and digital data to monitor trends and correct errors. Combined, those programs have amassed petabytes of data illuminating risk — both technological and human — in everyday flight operations, enabling manufacturers, airlines, and regulators to improve public safety through collaboration. Today, autopilot is treated as the norm, not an exception.

But the parallel between aviation and the roadways shows a distinct difference: U.S. drivers are not trained to proficiency. The last time you demonstrated your ability to drive a vehicle was likely as a teenager during your initial driving test at the DMV. 

This lack of proficiency, especially since driver-assisted technology has not been standardized among different manufacturers, makes the driver-automation coupling very risky. For human-assisted vehicles to work, drivers would need to be trained and a system for tracking data and reporting errors would need to be put in place. For this reason, the sooner the switch to full autonomy, the more lives can be saved.

More on AI A Feast of Sensor Data: Feeding Self-Driving Algorithms

Path Forward for a Safer Autonomous Vehicle Future

As the recent suspension of driverless vehicles demonstrates, government oversight of AVs hasn’t kept pace with advancing technology. Like all industries reliant on emerging technologies, most of the expertise lies in the private sector , where financial incentives compete for engineering skills. 

But when regulators overreact, it disincentivizes manufacturers to self-report the full set of data that could otherwise be used to guide technology development. Government overreaction has a chilling effect on manufacturer transparency.

In addition to the challenge of improving regulatory oversight, there are legal roadblocks to AV technology development. The U.S. tort system is not designed to manage risk. Its purpose is to compensate people who have already been harmed by “shifting the cost of harm to another person or entity who has erred in some legally cognizable way.” 

This approach means manufacturers will simply shift the technology from driverless to driver-assisted operations to shield themselves from liability. 

Instead, we need to see and understand the emerging risks of autonomous vehicles and manage them accordingly. Regulators such as the U.S. Department of Transportation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and your local DMV should transition to risk-based regulation strategies, similar to the way the FAA embraced Safety Management Systems in the 1990s. To do this, regulators must partner with industry and labor associations. 

An alternative to the U.S. tort injury compensation model has been proposed , modeled after government action to incentivize vaccine development. In 1986, Congress created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in response to lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers when people suffered harm. The program compensates people injured by certain vaccines while limiting manufacturer liability, which stimulates vaccine development. 

The rationale: The private sector would not pursue vaccine research and development if the liabilities outweighed the potential returns on investment.

The clear, collaborative path forward is a national alternative death and injury compensation program, combined with collaborative public-private partnerships in the auto manufacturing and rideshare industries. 

Much like in other industries, these actions would accelerate research and development and make U.S. roads far safer. If autonomous vehicles can drastically reduce the number of deaths and injuries on our roads, failing to embrace these measures would leave more Americans at risk of dying at the hands of human drivers. 

While driver-assist technology provides short-term, incremental benefits, delaying full autonomy will cost thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lives. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to save them.

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GM’s Cruise Automation autonomous-driving subsidiary is about to grow

GM plans to add more than 1,100 jobs and invest $14 million in a new research facility in San Francisco for Cruise Automation. The autonomous-driving tech company plans to move into the new facility by the end of this year, and hire the 1,100 new employees within five years, according to a GM statement.

Cruise will repurpose an existing facility in San Francisco, which GM says will more than double its research and development space. The California Office of Business and Economic Development, known as Go-Biz is giving GM and Cruise an $8 million tax credit for the new facility.

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GM and Cruise personnel are currently testing a fleet of automated Chevrolet Bolt EV electric cars on public streets in San Francisco, as well as Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Detroit metropolitan area. GM announced a major expansion of autonomous-car testing in its home city last year, after Michigan’s government approved new laws to encourage development of self-driving cars.

Unlike rival Ford , GM has not confirmed a timeline for the launch of a fully autonomous production car. But it may follow a similar strategy to Ford, which plans to use its self-driving car for ridesharing services only. GM already has a relationship with Lyft , and offers carsharing services through its own Maven brand in certain markets.

The use of self-driving cars in sharing services is considered more economically attractive than simply selling them to individual consumers. It also gives companies a greater degree of control over this new technology as it rolls out. But before autonomous ride sharing or car sharing can happen on a large scale, that technology must be perfected.

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• Robotaxi firm Cruise ordered to halve fleet following incidents

A self-driving car operated by General Motors-backed Cruise got stuck on Tuesday when it drove into a patch of wet concrete.

The incident happened in San Francisco and occurred just days after California's Public Utilities Commission made a landmark decision when it voted to allow autonomous-car companies Cruise and Waymo to expand their paid ridesharing services in the city to all hours of the day instead of just quieter periods.

Six years after launching its autonomous-truck program, Waymo has said it’s decided to focus more on developing its ridesharing ambitions using its self-driving cars and minivans.

The California-based, Alphabet-owned company said its decision to effectively put autonomous trucking on the back burner is down to the “tremendous momentum and substantial commercial opportunity” that it’s seeing with the pilot ridesharing service it launched in Arizona in 2018 before taking it to several other states. Customers involved in the program can use an app to call a Waymo driverless car in the same way they would book an Uber.

Volkswagen is taking autonomous driving a little more seriously. While the likes of Tesla and Waymo have largely led the development of next-gen driving tech, the legacy automakers are certainly starting to invest more heavily. To that end, Volkswagen has announced its first autonomous driving program in the U.S.

As part of the program, Volkswagen has outfitted 10 all-electric ID. Buzz vans with autonomous driving tech, in partnership with autonomous car tech company MobileEye. Over the next few years, Volkswagen says it'll grow this fleet of autonomous cars to cover at least four additional cities, with the current fleet operating in Austin, Texas. By 2026, Volkswagen hopes to commercially launch autonomous cars in Austin.

News Release Details

Fri, March 11, 2016

SAN FRANCISCO – General Motors Co. (NYSE:GM) announced today it is acquiring Cruise Automation to add Cruise’s deep software talent and rapid development capability to further accelerate GM’s development of autonomous vehicle technology.

“Fully autonomous vehicles can bring our customers enormous benefits in terms of greater convenience, lower cost and improved safety for their daily mobility needs,” said GM President Dan Ammann.

Cruise will operate as an independent unit within GM’s recently formed Autonomous Vehicle Development Team led by Doug Parks, GM vice president of autonomous technology and vehicle execution, and will continue to be based in San Francisco. Founded in 2013, Cruise has moved quickly to develop and test autonomous vehicle technology in San Francisco’s challenging city environment.

“GM's commitment to autonomous vehicles is inspiring, deliberate, and completely in line with our vision to make transportation safer and more accessible,” said Kyle Vogt, founder of Cruise Automation. “We are excited to be partnering with GM and believe this is a ground-breaking and necessary step toward rapidly commercializing autonomous vehicle technology.”

According to Mark Reuss, GM executive vice president, Global Product Development, Purchasing and Supply Chain, “Cruise provides our company with a unique technology advantage that is unmatched in our industry. We intend to invest significantly to further grow the talent base and capabilities already established by the Cruise team.”

The acquisition of Cruise is GM’s latest step toward its goal of redefining the future of personal mobility. Since the beginning of the year, GM has entered into a strategic alliance with ride-sharing company Lyft; formed Maven, its personal mobility brand for car-sharing fleets in many U.S. cities, and established a separate unit for autonomous vehicle development.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the second quarter.

General Motors Co. (NYSE:GM, TSX: GMM) and its partners produce vehicles in 30 countries, and the company has leadership positions in the world's largest and fastest-growing automotive markets. GM, its subsidiaries and joint venture entities sell vehicles under the Chevrolet, Cadillac, Baojun, Buick, GMC, Holden, Jiefang, Opel, Vauxhall and Wuling brands. More information on the company and its subsidiaries, including OnStar, a global leader in vehicle safety, security and information services, can be found at http://www.gm.com .

GM Forward-Looking Statement

In this presentation and in related comments by management, our use of the words “plan”, “anticipate,” “goal,” “expect,” “possible,” “target,” “believe,” “commit”, “intend,” “continue,” “may,” “would,” “could,” “should,” “project,” “appears,” “potential,” “on track,” “designed,” “effect,” “estimate,” “evaluate,” “forecast,” “initiative,” “objective,” “outlook,” “priorities,” “pursue,” “seek,” “will,” “when,” or the negative of any of those words or similar expressions is intended to identify forward-looking statements that represent our current judgment about possible future events. We believe these judgments are reasonable, but these statements are not guarantees of any events or financial results, and our actual results may differ materially due to a variety of important factors. Among other items, such factors may include: our ability to realize production efficiencies and to achieve reductions in costs; our ability to restructure our operations in various countries; our ability to maintain quality control over our vehicles and avoid material vehicle recalls and the cost and effect on our reputation of product recalls; our ability to maintain adequate financing sources, including as required to fund new and improved products and services and investments in new technology; our ability to realize successful vehicle applications of new technology; our ability to deliver new products, services and customer experiences; volatility in the price of oil; the ability of our suppliers to timely deliver parts, components and systems; the availability of wholesale and retail financing in markets in which we operate to support the sale of our vehicles; the success of our full-size pick-up trucks and SUVs; the results of our joint ventures, which we cannot operate solely for our benefit and over which we may limited control; changes in economic conditions, commodity prices, housing prices, foreign currency exchange rates or political stability in the markets in which we operate; changes in laws, regulations and policies or other activities of governmental authorities or stricter or novel interpretations and consequent enforcement of existing requirements; significant changes in the economic, political and regulatory environment and market conditions in China; costs and risks associated with litigation and government investigations including those related to our various recalls and risks, consequences and costs associated with failure to comply with the deferred prosecution agreement; increases in our pension expense or projected pension contributions; and our ability to manage risks related to security breaches and other disruptions to our vehicles, information technology networks and systems. GM’s most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q provide information about these and other factors, which we may revise or supplement in future reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

• GM is Positioned for Strong, Long Term Business Results

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GM’s Cruise autonomous vehicles relaunch in Dallas this week — with drivers

G eneral Motors’ autonomous taxi company Cruise began a soft launch in Dallas this week more than a year after it made its initial debut in the city.

The San Francisco-based ride-hailing service will use manually driven vehicles without autonomous systems engaged for now, and is only testing the service in a limited geographical area, according to a city memo . Although Cruise was using some autonomous tech in the city last year and was poised to begin final testing before launching fully automated service in the fall, the company suffered a major setback after a crash that involved a Cruise taxi dragging a pedestrian in San Francisco in October.

That led Cruise to recall nearly 1,000 vehicles and pause its robotaxi service nationwide. It’s been in talks with Dallas staff since late April about its revised approach following the incident, “which includes a greater emphasis on safety protocols,” the memo cites. Cruise announced leadership changes since last year, including appointing a new chief safety officer in February.

“Cruise’s AV stack is based on AI technology that learns from information gathered through our driving experience and retrains and evolves our models continuously,” a Cruise spokesperson said in a statement Monday. “The fleet learns from every intersection, construction zone, and road sign it encounters, and applies that knowledge to other environments and scenarios — much the same as a human driver learns, but with far more data and the ability to impart that continuous learning across the entire fleet. Because no two cities are the same, we plan to conduct this manual and supervised driving in multiple cities, including Dallas.”

Dallasites will not be able to hail a ride yet, since the taxis won’t carry public passengers yet. Next for Cruise is an expansion into supervised autonomous driving with a safety driver behind the wheel in the coming weeks, though still not with passengers on board.

Cruise is launching with three vehicles in Downtown, Deep Ellum, Lower Greenville, Uptown Park Cities and the Love Field area. Over time the company will expand the total number of vehicles on the road and the area of operations to other areas including Farmers Branch, Kessler and Bishop Arts district of West Dallas, a spokesperson said.

Last year Cruise was running tests using a small fleet of Chevy Bolts ahead of its anticipated automated launch in Oak Lawn, Uptown, Downtown, Deep Ellum and Lower Greenville. Cruise was also testing its autonomous vehicles in Houston and offered fully autonomous service in Austin and Phoenix along with its home city of San Francisco.

Cruise began conducting the first of several “extensive” training sessions Friday to train first responders on how the autonomous vehicles operate and how to engage with the fleet, the spokesperson confirmed.

Gus Khankarli, director of Dallas’ transportation department, did not respond to requests for an interview or comment about the move Monday.

GM had high hopes for Cruise before the October incident. It predicted annual revenue of $50 billion by 2030 from Cruise, which raised $10 billion in capital commitments from investors like General Motors, Honda, Microsoft, T. Rowe Price and Walmart. But Cruise has faced intense scrutiny since and has been criticized for causing traffic jams and blocking emergency vehicles in San Francisco.

Dallas officials hope the more cautious approach of Cruise’s relaunch will help the company avoid any local hiccups.

“Cruise has taken a proactive and collaborative approach in working with the city to rebuild trust in its safety protocols,” the memo reads. “As such, City staff looks forward to working with Cruise and to continuing to collaborate on our shared mission to improve road safety.”

©2024 The Dallas Morning News. Visit dallasnews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

autonomous driving

Zoox is expanding autonomous robotaxi rides to new us cities.

Autonomous technology developer  Zoox  is continuing its expansion of driverless robotaxi rides across two new cities in the US. This week, the company announced plans to start testing in Miami, Florida, and Austin, Texas, as it looks to begin commercial ride-hailing operations in the cities it’s already established in.

Zoox is one of the rare robotaxi developers actually bringing bespoke driverless technology to the masses. The Silicon Valley-based startup is also unique in that rather than converting existing EVs into ride-hailing vehicles like its competitors (a process facing its  own number of issues ), Zoox utilizes an entirely purpose-built EV without pedals or a steering wheel.

In February 2023, Zoox  began rides on public roads  in Foster City, California—marking the first time a purpose-built autonomous vehicle without any manual controls had done so. The startup has also expanded to Las Vegas, offering public rides in preparation for a full commercial launch, and Seattle, where it has been testing driverless rides in wet weather .

This past March, Zoox offered an update to its robotaxi taxi operations in its current cities, expanding operational hours and routes. Now, Zoox has shared plans to expand to more US cities and will begin robotaxi testing in those metropolitan areas soon.

Zoox to begin robotaxi testing to cities of Austin and Miami

According to a recent blog post from Zoox, Austin and Miami are the next two targeted cities for robotaxi operations. They are the fourth and fifth regions joining its growing list of public testing areas. Per Zoox’s senior director of policy and regulatory affairs, Ron Thaniel:

We’re laying the foundations for our autonomous ride-hailing service in new cities across the US. Austin and Miami offer key learning opportunities that will support the continued growth and refinement of our testing and service.

Zoox says its expansion to the two latest cities will begin with internal public testing soon. However, it was unclear when Miami or Austin residents may see the bespoke autonomous vehicles cruising around the neighborhoods – tiny areas near the business and entertainment districts, according to Zoox.

To begin, Zoox will conduct a brief mapping mission and then deploy a retrofitted Toyota Highlander test fleet with safety drivers present. The goal of the initial deployment will be to gather valuable insights and feedback before exploring the possibility of commercial rides with its bespoke EVs.

Zoox said it chose Austin and Miami as its following two robotaxi testing cities because the former has horizontal traffic lights, traffic lights hanging on wires, and a reputation for thunderstorms. It chose Miami because the city has traffic lights suspended diagonally across intersections. All should provide valuable data required for safe and efficient driverless ride-hailing services.

While testing is expected to begin in these two cities soon, Zoox relayed that residents should expect public robotaxi rides anytime soon. Instead, its target of commercial ride-hailing operations remains focused on San Francisco and Las Vegas to begin.

In addition to Austin and Miami, Zoox teased that it is “exploring several cities for future commercial offerings” after its initial robotaxi service launch.

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Scooter Doll is a writer, designer and tech enthusiast born in Chicago and based on the West Coast. When he’s not offering the latest tech how tos or insights, he’s probably watching Chicago sports. Please send any tips or suggestions, or dog photos to him at [email protected]

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