Cruise Self Driving Cars Autonomous Vehicles Driverless Rides & Delivery

Table Of Content

• Cruise’s progress
• Waymo, Cruise and Zoox Inch Forward Ahead of Tesla Joining Robotaxi Race
• Cruise ‘just days away’ from approval to mass-produce Origin robotaxis without steering wheels
• TechCrunch Mobility: Cruise robotaxis return and Ford’s BlueCruise comes under scrutiny
• Verge Deals
• Accelerating AV Development
• This week’s wheels

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. 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. This is the first time that Cruise has demonstrated its Level 4 capabilities.

Cruise’s progress

By Andrew J. Hawkins, transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. He then laid out the technology for the “Road to Sim,” which transforms into editable simulation scenarios real events that have been collected by AVs on the road. This ensures that the AV doesn’t regress by testing against scenarios it has already seen. “When we combine a high-fidelity environment with a procedurally generated city, that’s when we unlock the capability to efficiently scale our business to new cities,” said Gandhi. In January, the San Francisco-based startup said Microsoft Corp would join General Motors, Japan's Honda Motor Co Ltd and institutional investors for a combined new equity investment of over $2 billion. "We are focused on our path to commercialization right now but the IPOs happening in the space right now are a great indication of the strength of the industry and the opportunity self-driving presents," a Cruise spokeswoman said in a statement to Reuters.

Waymo, Cruise and Zoox Inch Forward Ahead of Tesla Joining Robotaxi Race

Cruise will reportedly combine its own software and engineering capabilities with Voyage’s market, which, Bloomberg notes, is well suited for driverless taxis. Within the infotainment center, the driver can choose either “manual” or “automatic” lane change options. When the automatic feature is selected and the ADAS is on, the vehicle will make automatic lane changes without driver input. As the car approached slower traffic, an arrow appeared on the instrument cluster (see photo), the system turned my indicator on and then made the lane change.

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

Having current and accurate information will help an autonomous vehicle understand where it is and the location of certain road features. We also measure our perception and prediction systems against our elevated performance criteria, using trained safety drivers as a benchmark. At this stage, no autonomous systems are engaged and the vehicles will not carry public passengers. 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.

TechCrunch Mobility: Cruise robotaxis return and Ford’s BlueCruise comes under scrutiny

Cruise cars consider multiple paths per second, constantly choosing the best ones for unexpected events and changes in road conditions. The version I drove came in at $97,615, due to all sorts of options, like a 10-degree rear axle steering system, head-up display, air suspension, AMG exterior and a $1,250 driver-assistance system. Majority owned by General Motors since 2016, Cruise combines a culture of innovative technology and safety with a history of manufacturing and automotive excellence.

Experts I spoke to agree that Vogt’s disclosure about remote assistance is interesting, less so in the context of the incident involving the hit-and-run victim and more so for the ability of robotaxi companies to operate a service that makes financial sense. All autonomous vehicle companies operating in California are required to report the number of miles driven, the number of vehicles, and the number of “disengagements,” which almost every expert agrees is an entirely worthless number. But beyond that, AV companies are allowed to operate almost entirely in secrecy. And as we can say from these past few weeks, that is a major problem. Microsoft — Microsoft and General Motors entered a strategic relationship in January 2021 to expedite the commercialization of autonomous vehicles.

Verge Deals

But since then, the company has been mired in a lengthy regulatory process before it can begin mass production. For years, driverless car operators have been selling this dream of human-free driving. But the reality is that the cars still need a human eye — and occasionally, a human hand. They may not be controlling the cars from afar — also known as teleoperation, or by some as “joy sticking” — but they are helping the cars make decisions in some capacity.

Accelerating AV Development

Critics accused the company of expanding too fast and cutting corners on safety. We believe driverless technology has the potential to save lives, enhance access and improve communities. Waymo has arguably done more than Cruise, reporting crash stats and publishing in-depth analyses on how its cars measure up to human ones. The purpose is to provide some statistical foundation to its core argument that robot-driven cars can operate more safely and predictably than human-driven ones. Test scenarios also include simulating the way other road users react to the AV. Cruise’s system for this is called non-player character (NPC) AI, which is usually a video game term, but in this context, refers to all of the cars and pedestrians in a scene that represent complex multi-agent behaviors.

This week’s wheels

San Francisco (Reuters) - Self-drive automaker Cruise, backed by General Motors Co, on Thursday said it raised $2.75 billion in its latest funding round with additional investment from Walmart Inc and others, taking the startup's valuation over $30 billion. Lyft and Uber said they will pause on their planned exit from Minneapolis after city officials decided to delay the start of a driver pay raise by a couple of months. Tesla dropped the monthly subscription price of its “Supervised FSD” (formerly known as “FSD Beta”) to $99, down from $199, in a bid to get more dollars and data from drivers. Elon Musk’s decision to green-light a robotaxi over an affordable EV might cost the company its lead, TC reporter Tim De Chant writes.

The string of engineers who spoke Thursday night during a deep dive into Cruise’s autonomous vehicle technology never mentioned Tesla’s name. Cruise is an autonomous vehicle company founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kun. Cruise is a subsidiary of General Motors and employs more than 1,600 people. It has raised $9.25B since inception from investors such as SoftBank, Honda, Microsoft, and T.

Its main rival, Google spinoff Waymo, has been testing its fully driverless vehicles in Phoenix for over a year, and recently announced it would be making its Level 4 taxi service available to more customers. The company had planned to launch a commercial taxi service in 2019 but failed to do so, and it has yet to publicly commit to a new date. Cruise was the fifth company to receive a driverless permit from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, the others being Waymo, Nuro, Zoox, and AutoX. Currently, 60 companies have an active permit to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver in California. The company said Tuesday that it will begin collecting road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix. In recent months, Cruise has been in talks with officials in 20 metropolitan areas where it previously operated cars in preparation to lay the foundation for eventual robotaxi service.

In October 2023, we paused operations of our fleet to focus on rebuilding trust with regulators and the communities we serve, and to redesign our approach to safety. We’ve made significant progress, guided by new company leadership, recommendations from third-party experts, and a focus on a close partnership with the communities in which our vehicles operate. Technological issues aside, what really put Cruise in hot water late last year was its response to the incident. Regulators accused the company of withholding information about the crash, only sharing that a Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian who had been flung into its path after first being struck by a human-driven vehicle.

Cruise Says Hostility to Regulators Led to Grounding of Its Autonomous Cars - The New York Times

Cruise Says Hostility to Regulators Led to Grounding of Its Autonomous Cars.

Posted: Thu, 25 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Cruise is relying on simulations not only to prove out its safety case, but also to scale to new cities without having to perform millions of miles of tests in them first. Learn how our data visualization tool shaped the future of autonomous driving. Learn the basics of how a Cruise car navigates city streets safely and efficiently. The announcement comes a week after peer TuSimple revealed plans for an initial public offering (IPO), at a time when self-drive technology is yet to be commercialised.

Maybe a human wouldn’t do it exactly that way, it becomes a national headline,” he said. And if the point of driverless cars is removing humans from the equation to make them cheaper to operate, then the financial impact of keeping all of these people on the payroll starts to add up. One of the questions seems to be whether Cruise withheld key evidence from the DMV. The department claims the company showed video of its car braking hard and stopping but failed to show footage of it dragging the victim as it pulled over to the curb.

Cruise was forced to reduce its fleet size after one of its vehicles collided with a fire truck, injuring a passenger. Cruise received permission in October that year to test fully autonomous vehicles (without a human safety driver) on public roads in California. It was allowed to test five vehicles any time of the day but they could not exceed speed limits of 30 mph or operate during heavy rain or fog.

Over the past several weeks we have communicated directly with officials, first responders, and community leaders in cities we’ve previously operated in to share updates on our path forward. We are committed to safely deploying our technology in close collaboration with officials and communities at every step. Safety is the defining principle for everything we do and will guide our progress through this process. Cruise’s AV stack is based on AI technology that learns from information gathered through our driving experience and retrains and evolves our models continuously.