Cruise Self Driving Cars Autonomous Vehicles Driverless Rides & Delivery

Table Of Content

• Scout Motors wants to put the ‘mechanical’ back into electric trucks
• What the Supreme Court case on tent encampments could mean for homeless people
• Cruise, GM's robo-taxi service, suspends all driverless operations nationwide
• California: San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego
• Waymo will launch paid robotaxi service in Los Angeles on Wednesday
• Cruise ‘just days away’ from approval to mass-produce Origin robotaxis without steering wheels
• Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars

Barra is now faced with the conundrum of what to do about Cruise. The company’s losses soared to $1.9 billion in the first nine months of 2023, well worse than the $1.36 billion in the previous year’s period. The big question for investors is how long it will continue to burn cash and how much more capital GM needs to infuse it with just to keep Cruise afloat. General Motors chief executive Mary Barra’s dreams of fostering promising young tech startup Cruise into a future cash cow for GM are turning to smoke following the departure of its founder and CEO, Kyle Vogt.

Scout Motors wants to put the ‘mechanical’ back into electric trucks

The vehicle needs a government exemption because it has no steering wheel or manual controls. The company is working toward submitting a permit application with the agency. This week’s presentation won’t just focus on GM’s plans and technology, the emphasis will be on how the automaker plans to start increasing revenue and profit with new vehicles and business lines. After paring the size of the core auto business overseas, Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra will lay out a road to growth. And hearing that these cars just have a meltdown when there’s emergency vehicles flying through a crowded street or when there’s lots of people around is concerning.

What the Supreme Court case on tent encampments could mean for homeless people

Robotaxis are getting more buzz as the technology advances in fits and starts. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Friday that Tesla would reveal a robotaxi product in August, though he gave no details. In one incident, worried fire personnel broke the windows of a Cruise vehicle in an attempt to prevent it from driving onto an active fire scene. Robotaxis have also delayed city transit buses and streetcars. Cruise said earlier this month that it has improved the way its technology responds to emergency vehicles and situations. But now Cruise has been cleared to charge for rides in vehicles that will have no other people in them besides the passengers — an ambition that a wide variety of technology companies and traditional automakers have been pursuing for more than a decade.

Cruise, GM's robo-taxi service, suspends all driverless operations nationwide

GM Slashes Spending on Robotaxi Unit Cruise, a Setback for Driverless Cars - WIRED

GM Slashes Spending on Robotaxi Unit Cruise, a Setback for Driverless Cars.

Posted: Wed, 29 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

As a result, the California Department of Motor Vehicles requested that Cruise immediately reduce its robotaxi fleet by 50% in San Francisco while it conducts an investigation into the company. General Motors’ Cruise is redeploying robotaxis in Phoenix after nearly five months of paused operations, the company said in a blog post. The cars will be in “manual mode,” so they won’t be driving themselves. “Many of the claimed benefits of (autonomous vehicles) have not been demonstrated, and some claims have little or no foundation,” Ryan Russo, the director of the transportation department in Oakland, California, told the commission last month. Whether or not San Franciscans like it, robotaxis are here to stay. And now they have unlimited access to the city and can charge money for it.

California: San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego

I think something that people don’t talk enough about too, with Cruise, is that they’re such cute little cars, that it really, truly is comical when they mess up. At the end of 2022, Cruise began testing its vehicles in Austin. The company currently offers a free driverless service in downtown and central Austin, including the University of Texas campus, from 9 p.m. The company said in March it would begin testing its Origins in the city within the coming weeks but has not confirmed if it has done so. Most autonomous vehicle companies have stuck to testing along the sun belt or in cities with mild weather.

GM's robotaxi unit Cruise to resume operations with small human-driven fleet in Arizona - Reuters

GM's robotaxi unit Cruise to resume operations with small human-driven fleet in Arizona.

Posted: Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]

“In the coming months, we’ll expand our operating domain, our hours of operation and our ability to charge members of the public for driverless rides until we have fared rides 24/7 across the entire city,” a spokesperson for Cruise told TechCrunch. The resolution passed by the commissioners said that the CPUC did not have enough information to conclude that robotaxis have been operating unsafely in the city. It says the commission will push to update the companies’ data collection requirements, including information on unplanned stops and interactions with first responders. Coning driverless cars fits in line with a long history of protests against the impact of the tech industry on San Francisco.

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

But California’s reliable weather, populous cities, surplus of tech talent, and first-in-the-nation AV regulations dating back to 2012 make it an attractive challenge for self-driving-car developers. Despite the bumps in the road, both Waymo and Cruise are rapidly expanding their robo-taxi programs throughout the U.S. Waymo is already giving rides in Phoenix and is testing with human safety drivers in Los Angeles and Austin. And Cruise is offering rides in Phoenix and Austin and testing in Dallas, Houston, Miami, Nashville and Charlotte.

In December of last year, the NHSTA opened a separate probe into reports of Cruise's robotaxis that stopped too quickly or unexpectedly quit moving, potentially stranding passengers. Three rear-end collisions that reportedly took place after Cruise AVs braked hard kicked off the investigation. And Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised his electric car company would be running robotic taxi fleet by the end of 2020.

Read on for a partial transcript of the conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity, and listen to the full conversation wherever you find podcasts. “People like to say that San Francisco is at the heart of the robotaxi revolution. You can see them crawling on every single street,” Lindqwister said. The city’s bumpy experiment with self-driving taxis is spreading nationwide, too. Data collection involves manually driving a robotaxi around to grab information on the local driving environment and climate. For Vogt, the problem is no longer his to solve, but he put on a brave face while making his goodbye from a self-driving startup he first founded in—where else?

So for another car option, private option, to show up like this, that gets a lot of folks really frustrated. Like, is this the right use of our time, of our priorities, of our funding? San Francisco has this pretty famous music festival called Outside Lands. And Cruise and Waymo were still operating around the park where the festival was held. Definitely not in robotaxis, according to some of our more adventurous readers. To learn more about riding in cars with robots, Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke to Lindqwister on Vox’s daily news explainer podcast.

The robots’ occasional struggles to interpret traffic conditions have in some cases delayed first responders, obstructed public transit, and disrupted construction work. Safe Street Rebel isn't the only group that's had issues with the autonomous vehicles. San Francisco's police and fire departments have also said the cars aren't yet ready for public roads. They've tallied 55 incidents where self-driving cars have gotten in the way of rescue operations in just the past six months.

Cruise says it runs 100 in San Francisco during the day and 300 at night. The Department of Motor Vehicles made Cruise cut that number in half after one of its cars collided with a firetruck last week. Various China-based tech startups are also testing self-driving cars on California roads, drawing scrutiny from lawmakers. That doesn't mean Cruise won't resume its driverless operations again one day. But it will boil down to what additional information comes out down the road — as well as Cruise identifying specific action items in the near future, Walker Smith added.

General Motors reported $1.9 billion in losses on Cruise in 2022, a jump over the $1.2 billion loss the year before, despite expanding its paid rides program. Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina said in a statement that the company will gradually over the coming weeks invite more than 100,000 people on a waiting list for robotaxi service to ride. Under previous permits, Cruise and Waymo operated some 550 driverless cars in San Francisco, though figures from the companies indicated they would collectively have only about 400 on the road at any given time. Today's decision by California regulators means the companies will be able to operate an unlimited number of robot cars that charge for rides on San Francisco’s streets. But the companies say their transition to a full-blown, Uber-like taxi service will take time.

Honda has stated a goal to launch a mobility-as-a-service in Japan using Origins by mid-decade. 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 CPUC’s decision to award Cruise with a deployment permit sets a precedent for how the state will continue to regulate commercial AV services in the future, so feedback from the public is crucial. And indeed some of the city’s recommendations did made it into the final draft language. That evening, his company became involved in a hit-and-run accident after a pedestrian struck by a human-operated car was propelled into the oncoming path of a Cruise robotaxi that accidentally pinned her underneath.