Cruise Announces Resumption of Trips
More than six months after suspending all journeys, Cruise announced the resumption of robo-taxi rides. These will initially start with safety drivers in Phoenix.
The resumption is to take place more slowly and in cooperation with the local authorities and residents.
Looking to the next chapter, our goal is to resume driverless operations. As we continue working to rebuild trust and determine the city where we will scale driverless, we also remain focused on continuing to improve our performance and overall safety approach. To that end, Cruise is resuming manual driving to create maps and gather road information in select cities, starting in Phoenix. This work is done using human-driven vehicles without autonomous systems engaged, and is a critical step for validating our self-driving systems as we work towards returning to our driverless mission. This will help inform where we ultimately will resume driverless operations.
The company had to stop driverless rides after an crash in San Francisco in October 2023. A woman was hit by a human driver, thrown onto a cruise and dragged along. Here is a schematic representation of the incident.
In the blog post, the company also describes the technical changes and reorganization it has carried out in the management team.
During our operational pause over the last few months, Cruise maintained ongoing and extensive testing in complex, dynamic simulated environments and on closed courses, enabling continuous retraining and improvement. Now, we are building on that work to create high-quality semantic maps and gather road information to ensure future operations meet elevated safety and performance targets. And because no two cities are the same, we plan to conduct this manual and supervised driving in multiple cities – starting with Phoenix – to expose our AVs to a diverse set of driving environments and conditions as we prepare for future driverless service.
When exactly and in which other locations, and when driverless Cruise Robotaxi will be on the road again, is not yet entirely clear.
This article was also published in German.
