AVs could play a key role in crisis relief for future pandemics
Photo: The News Wheel
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began earlier this spring, General Motors’ autonomous vehicle subsidiary Cruise has been giving back to the San Francisco community. The company has been partnering with nonprofit SF New Deal to help local food banks deliver groceries to those in need. So far, Cruise self-driving prototypes have made 50,000 contactless deliveries in the area.
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According to Medium’s Robert Grant, the volunteer effort began back in March when Cruise employees heard how food banks in the area were struggling to meet the surge in demand. These entities started brainstorming ways to scale their delivery to reach more households.
Cruise soon stepped in, offering its fleet of AV prototypes to deliver food essentials to San Francisco residents. More than 80 percent of these deliveries targeted neighborhoods below the city’s poverty line.
Cruise AV test operators currently ride along on the deliveries as a security measure, though in the future that may be unnecessary. Once AV technology becomes safer and human test operators aren’t needed, these vehicles could play a key role in crisis relief in the event of future emergencies such as pandemics.
Cruise AVs are not only providing essential services to San Franciscans; the project has also empowered Cruise staff with a new sense of purpose during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We are not just delivering food, we have managed to integrate into the fabric of our city with organizations now interacting with us and helping us identify opportunities to put our AVs to even greater benefit to our community,” said Cruise AV test operator Francis Sherry.
It will be interesting to see how Cruise and other self-driving car entities leverage their fleets to perform necessary services nationwide, as we all wait for the pandemic to subside. Hopefully, more AV companies will follow Cruise’s lead in partnering with local organizations to help Americans in need during this uncertain time.
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Whitney Russell is a current resident of Dayton, though her spirit can be found beach-bumming in Puerto Rico (the land of her half-Puerto Rican heritage). When not adventuring through the exciting world of car news, she can be found hiking with her husband and their two dogs, motorcycling, visiting her cute nephews and nieces, discovering new memes, reorganizing and/or decorating some corner of the world, researching random things, and escaping into a great movie, poem, or short story. See more articles by Whitney.
