Table Of Content
- Cruise Resumes Robotaxi Tests—Months After Pausing Operations Amid Safety Concerns
- Robotaxis score a huge victory in California with approval to operate 24/7
- Are Cruise Robotaxis Pushing Too Hard? Or Too Slow?
- California: San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego
- Cruise robotaxis now run all day in San Francisco, with public access after 10 p.m.
- Cruise robotaxi service is quickly expanding
Rather, we must work to determine what level of risk is acceptable and what is not. Regulators, like the DMV and NHTSA (and to a much lesser extent the PUC) should attempt to firmly quantify this risk level. Many of those making comment to the CPUC and in other fora, including of course the City of San Francisco, expressed the view that these vehicles should scale back, and that they were “not ready” for various reasons. Even though the CPUC did not grant the city’s requests to deny the new permits, last week the city attorney filed another request to reverse that decision. The Cruise vehicle then moved "rightward before braking aggressively, but still made contact with the pedestrian," the company said.
Cruise Resumes Robotaxi Tests—Months After Pausing Operations Amid Safety Concerns
Aside from San Francisco, where Cruise offers a full commercial robotaxi service citywide, the AV company has begun data collection and mapping in Los Angeles and San Diego. Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of General Motors, said Monday it has begun manual data collection in Seattle and Washington, DC, the first step toward launching commercial services in the cities. The robotaxi fleet will then apply that information to “other environments and scenarios,” which Cruise says is “much the same as a human driver learns, but with far more data” and “continuous learning” shared across the entire fleet. Until recently, Cruise has faced criticism around its lack of accessibility. The company was accused by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority and several other government agencies of failing to offer service in low-income and minority areas or accommodate people using wheelchairs.
Robotaxis score a huge victory in California with approval to operate 24/7
It’s many millions of lives, over not that many years, considered globally, though it will take some decades to make this reduction happen. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on October 16 opened an investigation into Cruise vehicles after receiving reports of two pedestrian injuries, including the October 2 incident. The Cruise cars "may not have exercised appropriate caution around pedestrians in the roadway," the agency said. The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) last month suspended Cruise's permits for autonomous vehicle deployment and driverless testing. Cruise subsequently announced a "pause" of all of its driverless operations in the US, which includes San Francisco, Austin, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Miami.
Are Cruise Robotaxis Pushing Too Hard? Or Too Slow?
Estimates suggest each American driver spends around 50 hours/year stuck in traffic and that number is getting worse. While solutions to congestion are more complex and speculative, the potential is strong. That 50 hours/person maps to over one million person years of 16 hour days wasted every year or 16,000 human lifetimes. Would we stop a saving of millions of hours of delay in the future to prevent a handful of hours today? She’s worried about 55 times this year that there was a bad interaction between robotaxis and her fire crews. If she wins her delay, this will mean thousands of delays and blockages with ordinary drivers in the years to come that could have been prevented, and millions around the world.
Once again, the question is a trade-off of minor additional risk today for massive risk reduction in the future. While the city has opposed all robotaxis, within the industry, there has been much discussion of the difference between Cruise and Waymo. While there has been no formal survey, it seems a common consensus is that Waymo’s vehicles perform a fair bit better and generate fewer problems.
For autonomous vehicle developers, every mile driven serves as proof that their technology works and as an opportunity to gather data for further improvement. Which is why Cruise, which has just announced that it has completed 1 million fully driverless miles, calls the achievement one of its biggest milestones yet. A spokesperson told us that those were miles driven with no safety driver behind the wheel and that most of them were collected in San Francisco. GM has already installed a new management team at Cruise and walked back its goals for a driverless division that was supposed to transform the transportation industry by operating robotic ride-hailing services across the U.S.
Cruise robotaxis now run all day in San Francisco, with public access after 10 p.m.
Cruise’s formula for rollouts typically starts with entering a new market with test vehicles to collect data and map, followed by AV testing with a human driver in the front seat. Eventually, Cruise drops the human driver and tests the vehicles autonomously. A ride-hailing service will then become available first to employees and then to customers who have signed up for the service. The service area and hours of operation usually start on a limited basis, often at night, and slowly expand. Like other robotaxi developers, Cruise's autonomous vehicles have occasionally distressed San Francisco safety advocates, drivers and pedestrians after they have stalled in traffic or blocked streets. In one incident this spring, Cruise vehicles blocked a street with fallen trees and became tangled in power lines connected to the city's MUNI transportation.
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]
Now Cruise appears to be going back to basics, a sharp pivot away from the aggressive growth strategy the company has been pursuing for the last few years. In 2022, former Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt — who stepped down amid last year’s controversy — told investors that Cruise had “de-risked the technical approach” by applying what worked well in San Francisco to similar ride-share markets. Whether you have a question or want to report an issue, our team wants to hear from you. Cruise's path to autonomous driving creates opportunities for increased mobility and independence.
Although Cruise has made significant advancements, concerns from authorities have been raised. The San Francisco Transportation Authority, in particular, expressed worries and called for regulatory restrictions or a temporary halt to Cruise's expansion, citing incidents where the self-driving vehicles abruptly halted in traffic, causing disruptions for emergency vehicles. Initially, the service may be limited to a select group of individuals and restricted to nighttime operations. Interested users will need to sign up for a waiting list and go through an acceptance process to create an account and access Cruise's robotaxi services.Due to the limited number of available cars, Cruise's services will remain exclusive to invitees for the time being. As the company continues to expand its fleet, the goal is to make the robotaxi service more widely available to the public. Cruise offers different types of service, including a commercial service that operates during late-night hours in specific neighborhoods of San Francisco.
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.
Even if officials, doing their job to promote long term road safety, express this tolerance, the public may not. Things can blow up on social media and in the press and create anecdotal perceptions very different from statistical reality. It’s a reasonable assumption that if we delay the testing, including live testing on our streets, we delay the deployment, the maturity and saturation. The delay in saturation won’t be exactly the same as the delay in saturation but it will be closely linked. You are unlikely to delay testing a year and not delay the rest a similar amount. It turns out that a delay of a year in saturation results in as many extra incidents as the better technology will prevent in a year once saturated.
She is trading hundreds today for millions in the future, perhaps because she’s inure to all the many ways ordinary drivers slow fire trucks every day and hasn’t yet been shown that something can be done about that. The early fleets, which are immature, and which present higher risk levels are tiny, and will add only a tiny amount of risk to our streets. Even if they drove worse than humans (which the companies claim they don’t on safety, but may do on congestion) there are only a few hundred. When they are much better, there will be at least 10,000 and possibly a million times as many. For we humans, each student driver who annoys us on the road turns into just one mature driver. When one robot makes a mistake, and it gets fixed, all the robots learn and don’t repeat that mistake.
