Cruise is Now Testing Driverless Cars in San Francisco
Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand for the last few years — and really, who could blame you — odds are you’ve seen tons of headlines about autonomous driving technology. One of the companies on the cutting-edge of this futuristic innovation is the GM-backed Cruise. Recently, Cruise reached a major milestone — becoming the fifth organization to test vehicles on the streets of San Francisco.
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Pioneering a driverless future
At the moment, there are five fully autonomous Cruise vehicles roaming the streets of San Francisco. As a safety precaution, the company places one so-called “safety operator” in the passenger seat. According to a report by The Verge’s Andrew J. Hawkins, a spokesperson for Cruise said, “the safety operator has the ability to bring the vehicle to a stop in the event of an emergency, but does not have access to standard driver controls.” Ultimately, the goal is to remove the human element altogether.
Unsurprisingly, the amount of time and effort it required to reach this point was substantial, to say the least. On a call with members of the press, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann stated that “getting to driverless in SF took more than five years of rigorous testing, over 2 million miles of driving in one of the craziest driving environments, together with hard work from a huge team of dedicated engineers and others across Cruise, as well as at GM. And not to mention several billion dollars of investment.”
Cruising with General Motors
Since GM acquired Cruise in 2016, the relationship between the two companies has run deep. It’s not hard to draw a connection between the tech company’s driverless ambitions and the Super Cruise semi-autonomous technology coming to the 2022 GMC Sierra 1500 Denali and more than 20 others in the next few years. Moreover, Cruise’s first driverless prototype — the Origin — will be produced at General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck plant.
Fully autonomous driving is inherently complicated, and experimenting with it on crowded city streets is a gamble. But, if Cruise’s technology is as impressive as it seems, it may bring GM one step closer to dominating one of the hottest segments in tech today.
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