Kyle Vogt, co-founder, president and chief technology officer of Cruise Automation Inc., spoke as he stood by the cruiseless electric shuttle at Cruise Origin during a revelation event in San Francisco, California, USA, on Tuesday, January 21, 2020.
David Paul Morris Bloomberg | Getty Images
Cruise Autonomous, a majority owner of General Motors, has just received the final approval it needs to offer its robotaxi service to paying riders in San Francisco, the company said Thursday.
Cruz boasted in a blog post that the permit was “the first driverless deployment permit issued by the California Communal Services Commission” and made the company the first to run a “driverless commercial service in a major U.S. city.”
The company’s cars are fully electric and battery-powered, which is also a potential benefit for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. The company told CPUC in a letter in April 2021 that it aims to make roads in California safer and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Earlier, the California Department of Motor Vehicles approved permits for autonomous vehicle deployment for both Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo.
Cruise already offered night travel to the public in San Francisco in its driverless cars, although it had not yet required passengers to pay a fee.
Earlier, police stopped a car without a Cruise driver in San Francisco, and the video of the accident went viral. The California DMV told CNBC that despite the incident, at the end of April, the department had not yet issued a driver’s license to any driver without a driver.
Rodney Brooks, an honorary professor of robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently took a taxi without a Cruise driver and wrote positively about the experience on his blog.
In that post, he said: “Cruz has created the MVP, the ‘Minimum Viable Product,’ a key element of successful technology.” He also clarified that he does not believe that the mass acceptance of cars without a driver is close. He wrote: “We still have ways to go and mass adoption may not be in the form of an individual replacement for the human driving that has driven this dream for the last decade or more.”
Cruise racers are also testing driverless cars in San Francisco.
Alphabet’s Waymo offered free driverless trips to employees or members of a testing program in San Francisco. He has also completed “tens of thousands” of driverless trips behind the wheel of Arizona.
Another driverless startup focused on transporting goods instead of passengers, Nuro, also has a deployment license to drive driverless cars in San Francisco.
While Tesla CEO Elon Musk often highlights the company’s ambitions to deliver cars that are “robot-ready”, Tesla vehicles have the most out of its beta program for full self-driving, an experimental driver assistance system that requires drivers to keep their hands on the wheel. and be careful of the road at all times.
Add Comment