Monday, April 1, 2024

Cruise just days away from approval to mass-produce Origin robotaxis without steering wheels

cruise robo taxi

The vehicle then stopped but, according to Cruise, “attempted to pull over,” dragging the woman an additional 20 feet. Cruise says this sort of evasive maneuver was built into the vehicle’s software to promote safety, and is required by both California and federal regulators. GM’s presentation will include updates on the automaker’s electric vehicle plans, its SuperCruise driver-assistance feature and how the company will use its Ultify software platform to generate more revenue from app-based services in cars. Cruise, in which GM has a majority stake, hopes to start charging for rides next year with a modified version of the Chevrolet Bolt electric car. Ammann is expected to say that if California Public Utility Commission approvals are obtained, the company could start offering shared ride services in 2023 with its Origin autonomous shuttle. It will be built alongside the Hummer EV and electric Chevrolet Silverado pickup in GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck plant.

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GM's Cruise Loses Its Self-Driving License in San Francisco After a Robotaxi Dragged a Person - WIRED

GM's Cruise Loses Its Self-Driving License in San Francisco After a Robotaxi Dragged a Person.

Posted: Tue, 24 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

The no vote came from Commissioner Genevieve Shiroma, who said the companies should explain the problems and how they plan to fix them first. One of the three yes votes was cast by Commissioner John Reynolds, who served as head lawyer at Cruise before appointed to the CPUC by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The cars sat motionless with parking lights flashing for 15 minutes, then woke up and moved on, witnesses said.

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GM’s regulatory approval likely hinges on how the company responds to questions surrounding the safety of its current crop of autonomous vehicles. In San Francisco, where Cruise says it operate nearly 400 fully driverless Chevy Bolt vehicles, the company has faced questions from city officials about incidents involving traffic jams and blocked emergency responders. Cruise was forced to reduce its fleet size after one of its vehicles collided with a fire truck, injuring a passenger. Charging for self-driving vehicle services would be a significant step for Cruise and other companies that have spent billions trying to get their technology ready and regulatory permission to run cars without a human safety driver. Technological progress and establishing approvals for robotic driving have taken longer than anticipated, making revenue elusive for startups.

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Cruise has not announced when or where it will resume driverless operations. The company’s main operations were historically based in San Francisco, but Cruise lost its permits to operate there following the accident. Cruise began expanding its paid service area in the Phoenix area in August 2023. Alphabet’s Waymo — Cruise’s main competitor that’s still active in San Francisco — has operated a paid, driverless robotaxi service in the area since 2020 and last year doubled its service area in downtown Phoenix and launched driverless rides to the airport.

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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. Cruise has yet to apply for the final permit it needs, which would be from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), to be able to charge for robotaxi services. Until such time, only Cruise employees and non-paying members of the public will be riding around in Sourdough and other human-less AVs.

California allows robo-taxis to expand and emergency responders aren't happy

That didn’t happen, although Musk is still promising it eventually will. Russ Mitchell covers the epic transition to electric vehicles and energy storage for the Los Angeles Times, blending technology, policy and consumerism, with a particular focus on California. The company also acquired startup Voyage in March in an effort to bring in tech talent. GM has said that Cruise had $55 million in revenue in the first half. The company charges for delivery services in Phoenix and gets some licensing revenue from Honda Motor Co.

The driverless vehicles have been hailed as a way to make taxi rides less expensive while reducing the traffic accidents and deaths caused by reckless human drivers. With this CPUC permit, Cruise is the only AV company in the city that can operate a commercial driverless ride-hailing service. Waymo, Cruise’s biggest competitor and the self-driving arm of Alphabet, also recently received a permit from the CPUC to charge for robotaxi, but only if a human safety operator is present during rides.

cruise robo taxi

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Cruise Resumes Robotaxi Tests—Months After Pausing Operations Amid Safety Concerns - Forbes

Cruise Resumes Robotaxi Tests—Months After Pausing Operations Amid Safety Concerns.

Posted: Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Besides being restricted to places and times where there is less traffic and fewer pedestrians on the streets, Cruise’s driverless service won’t be allowed to operate in heavy rain or fog either. A lot of people said that the robotaxis just couldn’t handle the floods of people walking on the street. And it’s kind of funny to see because the cars kind of look clueless. So you really can’t yell at them to move or honk at them either.

cruise robo taxi

Cruise Chief Executive Officer Dan Ammann is expected to say that the company plans to charge for rides as soon as next year and could expand in 2023 if Cruise gets the green light from California regulators. At the end of the day, it’s definitely a novelty to try out one of these cars. My parents are going to come visit in a month, and that’ll be the first thing I do, is show them the future in a robotaxi. And I think the big question now, too, is where this is going to fit in in the broader transportation landscape of not just San Francisco, but the state and the country.

Last month, the company said it was starting with a Los Angeles fleet of fewer than 50 cars covering a 63-square-mile area from Santa Monica to downtown L.A. Waymo, a spinoff of Google, had announced details for its service in Los Angeles in January as it sought state regulatory approval and local support. Within the last year, Waymo has offered free "tour" rides in Los Angeles, and last month, it received regulatory approval to expand to a paid service, despite pushback from the Teamsters union and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Forghani, the Cruise spokesperson, says the company has shared video and other information related to the incident with the California DMV and NHTSA officials. “Our teams are currently doing an analysis to identify potential enhancements to the [autonomous vehicle]’s response to this kind of extremely rare event,” she wrote in a statement. Cruise spokesperson Navideh Forghani says Cruise has stayed in close contact with regulators but disputed the DMV’s timeline.

Some speakers said they believed autonomous vehicle technology would make streets safer, pointing out that robots never get drunk, tired, or distracted. Thirty-nine people died on San Francisco roads last year, the most since 2007. Cruise will resume manual driving of its autonomous vehicles to create maps and gather road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix, the company said Tuesday. The GM subsidiary already had a presence in Phoenix before it pulled its entire U.S.-based fleet last year following an incident in San Francisco that left a pedestrian stuck under and dragged by a Cruise robotaxi.

The company needs to get approval from the DMV before increasing fleet size, a Cruise spokesperson told TechCrunch. We’re reintroducing a small fleet of manually-operated vehicles to begin mapping with trained safety drivers behind the wheel. By comparison, Musk has shrewdly avoided any temptation to move beyond beta-testing his autonomous cars by insisting customers at all times supervise his Full Self-Driving feature. Instead, he hopes they can train his neural net using 500 million miles of real-world data scraped from his fleet. Cruise, whose fleet had subsequently been cut in half, then multiplied its problems by omitting key facts around the Oct. 2 accident, according to California officials.

Waymo likes to say that they have a wait list of over 100,000 people. That’s a lot of people that are excited to drive in their cars. Having driven in so many robotaxis at this point, it’s most interesting to see humans’ relationships to these robot cars and not necessarily the robot cars themselves. When I’m inside them, I’ll see people flipping me off or just glaring or yelling at me because they feel so strongly about it. 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.

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