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Vogt, who initially led Cruise for eight years after its creation in 2013 and is also CTO and president, was tapped to succeed former CEO Dan Ammann in December. Cruise opened its autonomous ride service to the public in San Francisco on February 1. Safety is the defining principle for everything we do and will guide our progress through this process. Riders can also sign up for the waiting list through the Cruise app, which allows users to book cars. Flenniken is one of the newest members of the Cruise engineering team, joining last month to lead the embedded-software engineering work the Cruise robotics team performs. Flenniken oversees a team working closely with hardware engineers to design and build the sensors, networks, and computer platforms that power the Cruise fleet.
Rob Flenniken, senior director of engineering and embedded systems
In the past several years, Cruise has grown its team from around 40 employees, when GM acquired it in 2016, to 1,800 at the start of this year. GM-built electric Origin vehicles are to join Cruise's fleet by 2023. Prior to Cruise, Luo served as COO of DeepMap, a software company, where she worked on the self-driving-mapping company's go-to market strategy. Luo is an executive focused on the big picture for Cruise as it moves closer to commercialization. Some of her work includes collaborating with leadership to set clear long-term goals for scaling and expanding the business while helping teams across the company work efficiently to meet those marks.
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Terrible experience overall and will definitely avoid using Cruise in the future. I’m sure they’ll figure it out eventually but the current cost does not justify the hassle. However, it is unclear when, exactly, the company plans to roll out the extended service hours that are now allowed and how quickly Cruise will add people off of the waitlist. Elshenawy heads the biggest team at Cruise and oversees the work of some 1,700 engineers tasked with developing every aspect of self-driving tech. The expertise on his team ranges from AI, robotics, and product engineering to mapping, safety, and hardware. In this period, many startups ran out of money and hit the wall on technological development, thinning a herd of self-driving players that once powered the automotive industry's hype machine.
How Cruise went from buzzy self-driving startup to 'public safety risk' - Fast Company
How Cruise went from buzzy self-driving startup to 'public safety risk'.
Posted: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Great Experience but room for improvement
We’ve made significant progress, guided by new company leadership, recommendations from third-party experts, and a focus on a close partnership with the communities in which our vehicles operate. The final step with the DMV, which only Nuro has achieved, is a deployment permit. Nuro’s vehicles can’t hold passengers, just cargo, which allows the company to bypass the CPUC permitting process.
Zhang came to Cruise in 2020 with a strong background in vehicle safety. She was previously the senior director of engineering at Lucid Motors, an EV startup, where she oversaw vehicle safety and regulatory compliance. The quality of talent that startups attract is a major contributing factor in leading the autonomous-vehicle space, according to automotive-industry experts.
Here’s how to get robotaxi rides in San Francisco—and what it will cost
We believe AVs will save lives and significantly reduce the number and severity of accidents on America’s and Arizona’s roads every year. AVs will also improve lives - including creating convenient and safe transportation options for the elderly and those with disabilities. As we begin this journey, we look forward to partnering with local communities to jointly achieve our shared mission of making transportation safer for all. Google-run Waymo has a slightly smaller presence in San Francisco but announced a sweeping expansion plan immediately following the California Public Utilities Commission’s Thursday vote. The company previously offered free access to its pool of riders, but it is now able to charge users for its rides, all day and night.
It's the first company to receive permission from the California Public Utilities Commission.
“In the coming months, we’ll expand our operating domain, our hours of operation and our ability to charge members of the public for driverless rides until we have fared rides 24/7 across the entire city,” a spokesperson for Cruise told TechCrunch. "In the coming months, we'll expand our operating domain, our hours of operation and our ability to charge members of the public for driverless rides until we have fared rides 24/7 across the entire city." The CPUC said Cruise, along with any other company that eventually participates in the pilot, must submit quarterly reports about the operation of their vehicles providing driverless AV passenger service. Companies must also submit a passenger safety plan that outlines their plans for protecting passenger safety for driverless operations. Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company backed by General Motors, is now officially a commercial service.
The company said that fared driverless rides are currently taking place with “most riders” in the Northwest section of San Francisco. Cruise will continue “expanding our paid service in alignment with the smoothest customer experience possible,” a spokesperson said. With Cruise beginning to offer rides to the masses, Zhang has the critical task of overseeing safety and validation of the startup's driverless fleet. She has an instrumental role in every phase of development for Cruise's vehicles from design to testing to commercial deployment. “In order to launch a commercial service for passengers here in the state of California, you need both the California DMV and the California PUC to issue deployment permits.
At one point, the company had a goal to launch it in 2019, and it first began testing driverless cars in San Francisco in 2020. But Cruise isn’t the only company building fully driverless robotaxi services. Google spinoff Waymo, for example, is testing driverless rides in San Francisco and offers its Waymo One autonomous vehicle service in Arizona. And Argo AI, which is backed by Ford and Volkswagen, just announced that it’s testing fully driverless vehicles in Miami, Florida, and Austin, Texas. California is ground zero for AV testing in the US, with over 50 companies licensed to operate autonomous vehicles for testing purposes in the state.
The company would not be more specific about how long San Franciscans should expect to wait for access. Note that members of the press or government employees are not allowed to sign up. General Motors-backed Cruise operates some 400 cars in its fleet—they’re practically everywhere in San Francisco. Cruise co-founder, CTO and president Kyle Vogt was reportedly the first to ride the driverless AV, and he gushed about it all over Twitter.
The launch comes a few weeks after reports that the self-driving cars were causing a backup on a busy Montrose roadway triggered by malfunctioning traffic lights. In September, some of those autonomous cars caused another major traffic jam in Austin. Our goal is to earn trust and build partnerships with the communities such that, ultimately, we resume fully driverless operations in collaboration with a city.
AutoX, Baidu, Cruise, Nuro, Pony.ai, Waymo, WeRide and Zoox have driverless permits with the DMV. Cruise is a driverless ride service currently available in select cities. If your city requires an invite code, join the waitlist at We’ll send an invite code when a spot opens up.
But the limits are part of a plan by regulators and the company to prove out the safety and efficacy of its system before deploying it in more locations at additional times. The new operating window already extends its total active time by 1.5 hours as compared to the free driverless test pilot service it was offering between June of last year and the debut of this paid service. The permit, issued by the California Public Utilities Commission as part of its driverless pilot program, is one of several regulatory requirements autonomous vehicle companies must meet before they can deploy commercially. This permit is important — and Cruise is the first to land this particular one — but it does not allow the company to charge passengers for any rides in test AVs. Waymo was the first company to receive a driverless testing permit in 2018. And while the idea of a fully autonomous ride-hailing service is still Waymo’s “north star and ultimate service model,” according to a spokesperson, the company will only remove safety drivers from its vehicles when it’s ready to do so.
Cruise will also only be able to offer the rides if weather conditions don’t include “heavy rain, heavy fog, heavy smoke, hail, sleet, or snow,” per a CPUC press release. The company will begin offering its paid rides “gradually” in the city, Cruise COO Gil West says in a blog post. But while Cruise was approved to give rides in its fully driverless vehicles without safety drivers, Waymo only is allowed to deploy its autonomous vehicles with a human monitor behind the wheel. In order to give rides to paying passengers in its fully driverless vehicles, as it does in Arizona, the Google spinoff would need to apply for an additional permit from the California Public Utilities Commission.
Cruise vehicles with trained safety drivers will be mapping the streets of multiple cities soon, but driverless rides are not available at this time. Before welcoming riders, our operations teams complete a suite of comprehensive safety measures. The company is expected to have 30 electric vehicles in its fleet, offering its ride-hailing passengers paid rides. Those cars aren't allowed to operate on highways, however, or during times of heavy fog and rain. In its announcement, the company said it will begin rolling out fared rides gradually, including to areas not currently covered by its permit. 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. The company is offering driverless rides in western San Francisco through the app its product-engineering team built. Cruise is currently using its Chevrolet Bolt-based autonomous vehicles; the Cruise Origin, the startup's first AV built from the ground up, remains in development. 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.
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