Cruise's self-driving vehicles are officially back on the road and driving autonomously for the first time since one of its driverless vehicles dragged a pedestrian more than 20 feet in San Francisco.
Cruise said last month that it would resume testing with manually driven vehicles focused on mapping and collecting road information, minor tasks for a company with as many autonomous miles as Cruise. But Cruise needs to show local officials that he is adequately apologizing for the pedestrian drag incident by going slowly and talking a lot about safety and trust. The company is deploying its vehicles in Phoenix, Arizona, which has long been a hotbed of autonomous vehicle testing.
Cruise needs to show local officials that he apologizes appropriately
Cruise spokeswoman Tiffany Testo said the company is deploying only two autonomous vehicles with safety drivers behind the wheel. Additionally, the company has eight manually driven vehicles in the city. Over time, the service area will “gradually expand” to include Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert and Chandler, “measured against predetermined safety benchmarks.”
Cruise's slow return to the road is noteworthy, given the enormous obstacles the company faces following the October incident. Regulators accused the company of misleading them about the nature and severity of the incident, in which a pedestrian was dragged more than 20 feet by a driverless Cruise after being hit by a hit-and-run driver.
Since then, several top executives have left the company, including founder and CEO Kyle Vogt, and about a quarter of employees have been laid off. GM has said it will reduce its spending on Cruise. And an outside report found evidence that a culture of antagonism toward regulators contributed to many of the failures.
With everything going wrong, GM could have pulled the plug on Cruise. In fact, the robotaxi company has been a huge financial drag on the automaker, losing $3.48 billion in 2023. Other auto companies have pulled funding for their autonomous vehicle projects for much less. But instead, GM is hanging on to it (and Cruise is preparing to get back on the road), which is a sign that, for all its setbacks, the automaker still intends to compete with Waymo, Tesla and others for a place in the market. race towards an autonomous future.
