Kyle Vogt, co-founder, president and chief technology officer of Cruise Automation Inc., speaks while standing next to the Cruise Origin driverless electric shuttle during a revelation event in San Francisco, California, USA on Tuesday, January 21, 2020. .
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors, has just secured the final permit it needed to offer its robotaxi service to paying users in San Francisco, the company announced Thursday.
Cruise boasted in a blog post that the permit is “the first driverless deployment permit granted by the California Public Service Commission” and makes the company the first to operate a “commercial, driverless service in a great city in the United States. ”
The company’s cars are fully electric and run on batteries, which is also a possible victory in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. The company told CPUC in an April 2021 letter that it aims to make California’s roads safer and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Earlier, the California Department of Motor Vehicles approved autonomous vehicle deployment permits for both Cruise and Alphabet Waymo.
Cruise was already offering overnight trips to the public in San Francisco with its driverless cars, although it had not yet required passengers to pay a fare.
Police previously fired a driverless vehicle from Cruise in San Francisco and a video of the incident went viral. The California DMV told CNBC that despite the incident, by the end of April the department had not yet issued a traffic fine to any driverless vehicle operator.
Rodney Brooks, Professor Emeritus of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently traveled in cruise-free taxis and favorably wrote the experience on his blog.
He said in this post, “Cruise has created an MVP, a ‘minimum viable product’, the backbone of successful technology.” He also specified that he does not believe that the mass adoption of driverless cars is near. He wrote: “We still have a long way to go, and mass adoption may not be in the form of a one-on-one replacement for the human leadership that has driven this dream for the last decade or so.”
Cruise competitors are also testing driverless vehicles in San Francisco.
Alphabet’s Waymo has offered free driverless travel to employees or members of a testing program in San Francisco. He has also completed “tens of thousands” of driverless trips to Arizona.
Another driverless, passenger-focused startup, Nuro, also has a deployment permit to operate driverless cars in San Francisco.
While Tesla CEO Elon Musk often promotes the company’s ambitions to deliver “robot-ready” cars, Tesla’s vehicles make the most of their Full Self Driving Beta program, an experimental assistance system. to the driver, which requires drivers to have their hands behind the wheel. and be on the road at all times.