Autonomous car maker Cruise this week received the green light to remove human operators from self-driving vehicles in California. Though not the first to earn such a permit, the GM subsidiary will be the first to put it to use in a major US city.
“Before the end of the year, we’ll be sending cars out onto the streets of [San Francisco]—without gasoline and without anyone at the wheel,” Cruise CEO Dan Ammann announced in a blog post. “Because safely removing the driver is the true benchmark of a self-driving car, and because burning fossil fuels is no way to build the future of transportation.”
General Motors acquired Bay Area-based Cruise Automation in 2016 in an attempt to “accelerate” its autonomous vehicle development efforts. In the years since, Cruise has tested driverless cars in Arizona, Michigan, and its home town of San Francisco.
“We’ve accumulated over a million miles of fully autonomous driving in complex urban environments,” Kyle Vogt, co-founder and CTO of Cruise, said in a video (below), highlighting the company’s built-in AI “that can not only handle the mundane parts of driving, but also handle the crazy stuff that we see on the roads and [in] major cities every day.
“As a society, we’ve become too complacent with the million injuries and tens of thousands of deaths caused by car accidents in the US each year,” Vogt added. “It’s 2020 and the technology to change this is starting to appear.”
In 2018, Cruise revealed its first production-ready car without a steering wheel, pedals, or manual controls. And earlier this year unveiled the self-driving, all-electric Origin—”our answer to the question about what transportation system you’d build, if you could start from scratch,” Ammann said in January.
Rival Waymo recently emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic to offer a limited number of fully driverless taxi rides to folks in Phoenix; Waymo One test passengers are invited to experience true autonomous driving on the streets of Arizona’s capital.
