Cruise taxis can now charge for driverless rides in San Francisco

Table Of Content

• San Francisco’s robotaxi experiment is getting out of hand
• Waymo will launch paid robotaxi service in Los Angeles on Wednesday
• The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
• Latest California
• Former HGTV star slapped with $10 million fine and jail time for real estate fraud
• Scout Motors wants to put the ‘mechanical’ back into electric trucks

GM reported a $561 million first-half loss attributable to Cruise. Hosts Sean Rameswaram and Noel King will guide you through the most important stories of the day. Today, Explained is now available on public radio stations across the US. For more daily news offerings, check out Vox's weekday newsletter. Maybe that makes me a stingy rider, but I don’t really feel the need to tip the technology. Self-driving taxis are ferrying passengers across San Francisco and Phoenix, and they could be coming to a street near you very soon.

San Francisco’s robotaxi experiment is getting out of hand

In some of my reporting, we found that people are starting to do debaucherous things or unseemly things in the car. We found a handful of people who had either had sex or hooked up in the back of a robotaxi because there’s just no driver to tell you you can’t do that. The companies obviously don’t plug this as something that you should do in their vehicles. While Cruise has been sidelined in San Francisco, another robotaxi operated by Waymo is continuing to give rides throughout the city. Waymo, which began as as secret project within Google more than a decade ago, has been running another robotaxi service in Phoenix for the past three years. Now Cruise is being forced to slam on the brakes on its operations after the DMV concluded its robotaxis posed "an unreasonable risk to public safety," according to a statement issued by the agency.

Waymo will launch paid robotaxi service in Los Angeles on Wednesday

How GM's Cruise robotaxi tech failures led it to drag pedestrian 20 feet - Reuters

How GM's Cruise robotaxi tech failures led it to drag pedestrian 20 feet.

Posted: Fri, 26 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

The company needs to get approval from the DMV before increasing fleet size, a Cruise spokesperson told TechCrunch. We’re reintroducing a small fleet of manually-operated vehicles to begin mapping with trained safety drivers behind the wheel. By comparison, Musk has shrewdly avoided any temptation to move beyond beta-testing his autonomous cars by insisting customers at all times supervise his Full Self-Driving feature. Instead, he hopes they can train his neural net using 500 million miles of real-world data scraped from his fleet. Cruise, whose fleet had subsequently been cut in half, then multiplied its problems by omitting key facts around the Oct. 2 accident, according to California officials.

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

Last month, the company said it was starting with a Los Angeles fleet of fewer than 50 cars covering a 63-square-mile area from Santa Monica to downtown L.A. Waymo, a spinoff of Google, had announced details for its service in Los Angeles in January as it sought state regulatory approval and local support. Within the last year, Waymo has offered free "tour" rides in Los Angeles, and last month, it received regulatory approval to expand to a paid service, despite pushback from the Teamsters union and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Forghani, the Cruise spokesperson, says the company has shared video and other information related to the incident with the California DMV and NHTSA officials. “Our teams are currently doing an analysis to identify potential enhancements to the [autonomous vehicle]’s response to this kind of extremely rare event,” she wrote in a statement. Cruise spokesperson Navideh Forghani says Cruise has stayed in close contact with regulators but disputed the DMV’s timeline.

The driverless vehicles have been hailed as a way to make taxi rides less expensive while reducing the traffic accidents and deaths caused by reckless human drivers. With this CPUC permit, Cruise is the only AV company in the city that can operate a commercial driverless ride-hailing service. Waymo, Cruise’s biggest competitor and the self-driving arm of Alphabet, also recently received a permit from the CPUC to charge for robotaxi, but only if a human safety operator is present during rides.

Latest California

GM robotaxi unit Cruise offers $75000 to resolve crash probe - Reuters

GM robotaxi unit Cruise offers $75000 to resolve crash probe.

Posted: Sat, 06 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

The no vote came from Commissioner Genevieve Shiroma, who said the companies should explain the problems and how they plan to fix them first. One of the three yes votes was cast by Commissioner John Reynolds, who served as head lawyer at Cruise before appointed to the CPUC by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The cars sat motionless with parking lights flashing for 15 minutes, then woke up and moved on, witnesses said.

Former HGTV star slapped with $10 million fine and jail time for real estate fraud

GM’s regulatory approval likely hinges on how the company responds to questions surrounding the safety of its current crop of autonomous vehicles. In San Francisco, where Cruise says it operate nearly 400 fully driverless Chevy Bolt vehicles, the company has faced questions from city officials about incidents involving traffic jams and blocked emergency responders. Cruise was forced to reduce its fleet size after one of its vehicles collided with a fire truck, injuring a passenger. Charging for self-driving vehicle services would be a significant step for Cruise and other companies that have spent billions trying to get their technology ready and regulatory permission to run cars without a human safety driver. Technological progress and establishing approvals for robotic driving have taken longer than anticipated, making revenue elusive for startups.

Waymo likes to say that they have a wait list of over 100,000 people. That’s a lot of people that are excited to drive in their cars. Having driven in so many robotaxis at this point, it’s most interesting to see humans’ relationships to these robot cars and not necessarily the robot cars themselves. When I’m inside them, I’ll see people flipping me off or just glaring or yelling at me because they feel so strongly about it. While Cruise’s CPUC permit allows for a fleet of up to 30 all-electric autonomous vehicles, Cruise has not been shy about promoting its plans to scale rapidly in the near future.

Technology

Cruise ridehail services are not available at this time, but you can join the waitlist to be one of the first. We’re working to bring new transportation options that work for you and your community. We believe driverless technology has the potential to save lives, enhance access and improve communities.

Cruise’s first human-less deployment comes about a week after GM CEO Mary Barra said the company is confident that Cruise will begin commercial driverless ride-hailing and delivery operations by next year. Cruise has yet to apply for the final permit it needs, which would be from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), to be able to charge for robotaxi services. Until such time, only Cruise employees and non-paying members of the public will be riding around in Sourdough and other human-less AVs.

That didn’t happen, although Musk is still promising it eventually will. Russ Mitchell covers the epic transition to electric vehicles and energy storage for the Los Angeles Times, blending technology, policy and consumerism, with a particular focus on California. The company also acquired startup Voyage in March in an effort to bring in tech talent. GM has said that Cruise had $55 million in revenue in the first half. The company charges for delivery services in Phoenix and gets some licensing revenue from Honda Motor Co.

Some speakers said they believed autonomous vehicle technology would make streets safer, pointing out that robots never get drunk, tired, or distracted. Thirty-nine people died on San Francisco roads last year, the most since 2007. Cruise will resume manual driving of its autonomous vehicles to create maps and gather road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix, the company said Tuesday. The GM subsidiary already had a presence in Phoenix before it pulled its entire U.S.-based fleet last year following an incident in San Francisco that left a pedestrian stuck under and dragged by a Cruise robotaxi.