GM’s Cruise scraps 2019 launch plans but expands San Francisco testing

Enlarge / In January 2018, Cruise said that it would begin producing cars like this before the end of 2019 for use in a commercial taxi service. (credit: Cruise)

In late 2017, Cruise, the self-driving startup that is majority owned by General Motors, announced that it planned to launch a driverless commercial taxi service by the end of 2019. The company stuck to this 2019 launch date even after Google’s Waymo missed its own self-imposed goal to launch a fully driverless service by the end of 2018.

But in a post this morning, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann now admits that Cruise won’t launch a commercial driverless service in 2019 after all. Instead, he says, Cruise will further expand its testing infrastructure in San Francisco, preparing the company for a large-scale launch at some unspecified date in the future.

“Our first deployment needs to be done right and we will only deploy when we can demonstrate that we will have a net positive impact on safety on our roads,” Ammann writes.