The move announced Wednesday by GM-owned Cruise come two
months after the company received California's permission to fully driverless
cars in the state.
Like dozens of other companies testing the robotic
technology, Cruise's self-driving cars have been allowed on California public
streets for several years with humans poised behind the wheel to take over in
an emergency. Now, Cruise is confident enough to send out its self-driving cars
without that safety net, instead monitoring from remote locations and, at least
initially, having a company employee sitting in the front passenger seat. That
employee won't have access to the same controls as a backup driver and
eventually won't be sitting in front, according to the company.
“You're seeing fully driverless technology out of the
(research and development) phase and into the beginning of the journey to being
a real commercial product," Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said Wednesday.
California regulators also recently approved new rules
allowing ride-hailing services to pick up passengers in self-driving cars, but
Cruise isn't going down that road yet.
Instead, Ammann pledged the company will move cautiously
while dispatching up to five fully driverless cars into parts of San Francisco
initially. Cruise's employees most likely will be the only passengers initially
riding in the fully driverless cars, just as they were when the company was
testing the vehicles with a human backup behind the wheel.
Ammann declined to provide a timeline when asked if Cruise
planned to use its driverless cars in ride-hailing service within San Francisco
next year.
Cruise, which GM bought in 2016, had initially set a goal of
using driverless cars in a ride-hailing service by the end of last year, but
perfecting the required technology has proven far more challenging than some of
the world's top robotic engineers envisioned when they working on their
driverless technology anywhere from five to 10 years ago.
Waymo, a self-driving car pioneer spun out of a Google
project, also has had to move more slowly with a robotic ride-hailing service
it launched in the Phoenix area two years ago. That service, though, has been
able to steadily expand since its debut, and Waymo also has a permit to deploy
fully driverless cars in California, although the company hasn't yet indicated
when it might do that.
Three other companies have California permits to operate
fully driverless cars in the state: AutoX Technologies, delivery service Nuro,
and Amazon's Zoox, which recently posted a video promoting a December 14 announcement
about its future direction.
Cruise has spent the past five years testing its technology
that has been used in 2 million miles of self-driving to reach this point in
its evolution.
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