Cruise Scales Up Self-Driving Car Tests As It Delays Driverless Ride Service Launch

Cruise, the self-driving tech startup backed by General Motors, said it won’t launch a planned driverless ride service this year but instead intends to more than double testing of its battery-powered robot cars in San Francisco, its first market.

The change in plans allows extra time to ensure a high level of safety and public trust in Cruise’s capabilities before it takes the first step toward commercializing a driverless service, CEO Dan Ammann said. GM Chief Mary Barra had said in late 2017 that Cruise would be ready to begin public rides “at scale” in “complex urban environments” by 2019, but neither Cruise nor GM had provided recent updates.

“We’re in this technology race to obviously deploy this technology and do it safely, but we also think there’s a trust race,” Ammann tells Forbes. He declined to set a new date for when a Cruise-branded service will launch.

“Every day that we don’t have the technology deployed and adding safety on the road is a missed opportunity,” he says. “That’s why we’re ramping up our testing here in the balance of this year to move as quickly as we can to the point where we can deploy a fully driverless service.”

Cruise’s revised plans come amid growing recognition of the technological complexity of moving fleets of self-driving vehicles out of tightly controlled test fleets into daily use for paying riders. Aside from the monumental challenge of teaching robots to master unpredictable circumstances on public streets, particularly those involving pedestrians, cyclists and human drivers, there’s an equally big need to assure the public that self-driving vehicles are safe. That’s a tall order in the aftermath of the death of a pedestrian killed by an Uber test vehicle in Arizona last year and fatal accidents involving Tesla drivers who may have put too much faith in the company’s Autopilot driver-assist feature. 

Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving startup, launched paid public rides in late 2018 in Chandler, Arizona, though users of the Waymo One service are still being picked up in Pacifica Hybrid minivans with a safety driver at the wheel. Currently, it gives about 1,000 paid rides per week. Lyft and Aptiv, a maker of components and software for driverless systems, also operate a public test program in Las Vegas that has logged more than 50,000 rides, each with safety drivers in the front seat.

Ammann, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker who joined post-bankruptcy GM in 2010 and eventually became its president, oversaw the automaker’s acquisition of Cruise in 2016 in a deal valued at $1 billion. He shifted roles to take over as CEO of the tech company that’s also drawn multibillion-dollar investments from Honda and SoftBank, boosting its valuation to as much as $19 billion. Ammann declined to comment on the possibility that an IPO is in the works. 

While there are no immediate plans to dramatically expand Cruise’s test fleet of 180 heavily modified Chevrolet Bolt electric cars, they will be in operation almost constantly in San Francisco to rapidly build up a much bigger base of test miles. To make sure as many of the Cruise vehicles can be recharged as quickly as possible at the same time, the company is adding a massive fast-charge EV station in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood — the largest in the nation.

While Cruise cars won’t be hauling passengers this year, they’ll be a more common sight on San Francisco streets. The company, which now boasts 1,500 employees, will ramp up public outreach, working with the city and hosting events at the California Academy of Sciences and other city locales to provide information about its technology to curious locals.

“We’ve all seen what happens when transformative technologies are sort of dropped onto society,” Amman said. “We want to deploy this with the community, not at the community.”