GM-Backed Cruise Launches Driverless Ride Service In San Francisco

Table Of Content

• Driverless delivery
• Wei Luo, vice president of strategy, product, and operations
• It's the first company to receive permission from the California Public Utilities Commission.
• Cruise gets the green light to give driverless rides to passengers in San Francisco
• Cruise set to start driverless ride-hailing service in Houston

We partner with cities to provide services that support communities through driverless ridehail and delivery. Next, we’ll validate our AV’s end-to-end performance against our rigorous safety and AV performance requirements through supervised autonomous driving on public roads, in addition to the ongoing simulation and closed course driving we do. During this phase, the Cruise vehicles will drive themselves and a safety driver is present behind the wheel to monitor and take over if needed. Any company that wants to eventually shuttle and charge passengers for rides in their robotaxis have to secure all of these permits from the DMV and CPUC. Cruise, the autonomous vehicle subsidiary of GM that also has backing from SoftBank Vision Fund, Microsoft and Honda, has secured a permit that will allow the company to shuttle passengers in its test vehicles without a human safety operator behind the wheel.

Driverless delivery

Scheau joined Cruise two years ago, and since then she has spent much of her time recruiting and retaining talent in the areas of applied science, research, and engineering. Before joining Cruise, Scheau was the director of engineering at Facebook. "One of the biggest shifts for us in the last few years is to have this resilience mindset," Mo Elshenawy, Cruise's executive vice president of engineering, said. "Another excellent @Cruise ride. From a hotel to a grocery store and back to the hotel - fully autonomously. If you think the future is not here yet, you’re just yet to try it. Long autonomy. P.S. Tweeting this from an AV." Cruise's path to autonomous driving creates opportunities for increased mobility and independence.

Wei Luo, vice president of strategy, product, and operations

Over the past several weeks we have communicated directly with officials, first responders, and community leaders in cities we’ve previously operated in to share updates on our path forward. We are committed to safely deploying our technology in close collaboration with officials and communities at every step. When it showed 0 minutes left we walked over 20 minutes to the car icon on the map ( which was stuck and never moved). Overall we wasted almost an hour on this and had to take an Uber.

It's the first company to receive permission from the California Public Utilities Commission.

A handful of companies hold permits to test fully driverless vehicles, without safety drivers behind the steering wheel. And an even smaller number have been approved to pick up and drop off passengers as part of a commercial pilot service. The company first received permission to offer passengers free robotaxi rides almost exactly a year ago and opened fully driverless ride-hailing to the public this February. In March, the CPUC gave Cruise (and Waymo) permission to start charging their passengers, but only for rides with a safety driver behind the wheel. Now, Cruise can charge customers even if there's nobody else onboard.

While Cruise’s CPUC permit allows for a fleet of up to 30 all-electric autonomous vehicles, Cruise has not been shy about promoting its plans to scale rapidly in the near future. Last year, former CEO Dan Ammann laid out Cruise’s plans for growing its fleet of purpose-built Origin AVs to thousands, even tens of thousands, in the coming years. And while the service will offer quick rides, regulating those driverless vehicles could pose a challenge for city officials. A senate bill was written into law in 2017 that prohibits cities in Texas from regulating driverless vehicles. In October 2023, we paused operations of our fleet to focus on rebuilding trust with regulators and the communities we serve, and to redesign our approach to safety.

“It could be some time before people on the waitlist get to use the product but we have already started carrying members of the public and we're working through that waitlist now, adding new people every day,” he said during GM’s results call on Tuesday afternoon. For example, the deployment decision directs the Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division (CPED) of the CPUC to include whether or not a citation was issued in a collision or incident involving law enforcement in its categories of incidents for reporting. In addition, to support easier access, CPED conceded to post Cruise’s driverless deployment operational design domains on its website.

Separately, the company said that SoftBank completed the investment of an additional $1.35 billion into it, part of an earlier plan. That boosts its total funding to $10 billion, coming from GM, Honda, Walmart and Microsoft, in addition to SoftBank.

Cruise pauses all driverless operations after collisions with pedestrians, permit suspensions in California - CNBC

Cruise pauses all driverless operations after collisions with pedestrians, permit suspensions in California.

Posted: Thu, 26 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Cruise launches driverless robotaxi service in San Francisco

Today we are honored to have been the first to receive a driverless autonomous service permit to test transporting passengers from the California PUC,” Prashanthi Raman, Cruise’s director of Government Affairs said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. Cruise’s driverless cars have driven more than 5 million miles in the U.S. and more than 1 million miles in Texas, offering select rides to Cruise employees in Houston since August. During our operational pause over the last few months, Cruise maintained ongoing and extensive testing in complex, dynamic simulated environments and on closed courses, enabling continuous retraining and improvement. Now, we are building on that work to create high-quality semantic maps and gather road information to ensure future operations meet elevated safety and performance targets. And because no two cities are the same, we plan to conduct this manual and supervised driving in multiple cities - starting with Phoenix - to expose our AVs to a diverse set of driving environments and conditions as we prepare for future driverless service. Cruise has spent years amassing millions of miles of on-road and simulated testing for its driverless cars.

The rides had to be at night because according to the stipulations of Cruise’s “driverless deployment permit” from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the company can only operate driverless between the hours of 10 p.m. Cruise received the permit in early October, which allows the company to deploy its vehicles without a human onboard, as well as charge fees for delivery services, but crucially not ride-hailing services. There are two regulatory bodies, the CPUC and the California Department of Motor Vehicles, that dictate the testing and eventual deployment of autonomous vehicles. The California DMV regulates testing of autonomous vehicles with and without safety operators. About 55 companies have permits to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver. Driverless testing permits, in which a human operator is not behind the wheel, have become the new milestone and a required step for companies that want to launch a commercial robotaxi or delivery service in the state.

“To give Houstonians a warm welcome, we’re offering $5 flat fares for all trips for a limited time,” Cruise spokeswoman Elizabeth Conway said Thursday. “As we expect demand will be incredibly high—there are over 100,000 people on our waitlist—we’ll be adding riders incrementally,” a Waymo spokesperson said Friday. A company spokesperson said Waymo will invite new guests gradually as the fleet expands in numbers and reach.

Mehanna leads the team that leverages the datasets from those tests to build artificial-intelligence models that can teach Cruise's fleet how to drive more like a human on unpredictable urban roads. Cruise's perception team builds the technology that "sees" the road and other obstacles around a self-driving car. As leader of the perception team, Scheau has overseen millions of miles in real-world and simulation testing to improve the way Cruise's vehicles navigate the streets of San Francisco. The company needs to get approval from the DMV before increasing fleet size, a Cruise spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The company, currently led by cofounder Kyle Vogt, said it opened up a waiting list today for people wanting to use the service, dubbed the Cruise Rider Community program. Cruise last year received approval from California to offer free rides in its driverless vehicles, though it’s still waiting for the final permit from the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates taxi and ride services. The first step is identifying high fidelity location data for road features and map information like speed limits, stop signs, traffic lights, lane paint, right turn only lanes and more. Having current and accurate information will help an autonomous vehicle understand where it is and the location of certain road features. We also measure our perception and prediction systems against our elevated performance criteria, using trained safety drivers as a benchmark.

With 15 years of experience in the field, Piastrelli said he was able to assemble a dream team of sorts for Cruise's security division that includes the hackers who remotely hijacked a Jeep Cherokee in a 2015 viral video for Wired. "There's only so much inspiration you can pump into your team yourself," Elshenawy said. "It's very different when you can get into this car at the end of the day and see all of your hard work." Whether you have a question or want to report an issue, our team wants to hear from you. / Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we've tested sent to your inbox weekly.

This will help inform where we ultimately will resume driverless operations. The era of commercial autonomous robotaxi service is here — Cruise officially became the first company to offer fared rides to the general public in a major city as of late Wednesday. The milestone comes after Cruise received official approval from the California Public Utilities Commission in early June to operate driverless in a commercial capacity.

Sign in with your email and phone number.HOW TO RIDE- Request a ride during operating hours- There are places we can’t go yet, but stay tuned. - Meet your ride at your pickup spot- Unlock the doors from the Cruise app on your phone- Hop in, buckle up, and enjoy the ride - Cruise Support is standing by if you need help- End your ride early at any timeHAVE FUN. Your Cruise will have more than 40 sensors, never get distracted or tired, and boast a 360° view of the road. We've already logged millions of miles on San Francisco’s hectic streets. Crank up your music or wind down after a long day— your ride style is totally up to you. It’s a magical, welcoming, judgment-free experience.Your ride’s here.

Waymo has been offering a fully autonomous commercial ride-hail service in Chandler, a city southeast of Phoenix, since 2020, and recently expanded its driverless program in the city. Looking to the next chapter, our goal is to resume driverless operations. As we continue working to rebuild trust and determine the city where we will scale driverless, we also remain focused on continuing to improve our performance and overall safety approach. To that end, Cruise is resuming manual driving to create maps and gather road information in select cities, starting in Phoenix. This work is done using human-driven vehicles without autonomous systems engaged, and is a critical step for validating our self-driving systems as we work towards returning to our driverless mission.