Cruise will soon hit San Francisco with no hands on the wheel
GM subsidiary wins approval from California to offer driverless passenger service. …
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Last week, Waymo, the self-driving-vehicle developer owned by Alphabet, expanded a first-of-its-kind service offering rides to paying passengers around Phoenix—with no one behind the wheel. Videos shared by Waymo and others show its minivans navigating wide, sunny streets with ease.
Now rival Cruise, a General Motors subsidiary, has taken a step toward running its own self-driving-taxi service—on the hilly, winding, pedestrian-swarmed streets of San Francisco. On Thursday, Cruise said the California Department of Motor Vehicles had granted it a permit to test up to five of its modified Chevy Bolts without anyone behind the wheel. In a blog post, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said truly driverless cars would operate in the city before the end of the year.
Most of the more than 60 companies with DMV permits to test autonomous vehicles in California must keep at least one safety driver inside, who sits behind the wheel and monitors the technology. Four other companies—Waymo, Amazon-owned Zoox, delivery-robot company Nuro, and AutoX—have received permits to test totally driverless vehicles in the state. But none is testing its driverless cars in areas as hectic as San Francisco.
The permit is a sign that companies like Cruise “are transitioning out of the development phase of the technology,” says Kyle Vogt, the company’s
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