General Motors’ Cruise LLC has truly self-driving cars — no safety driver — on the roads of San Francisco.
The company said it’s doing so well that it hinted at commercializing the cars sometime in 2021 with the goal of taking the fleet to other significant cities.
“We’re starting small with just a few cars, in a few areas of the city and we’ll be expanding to different parts of the city, at different times of day, until we’re operating everywhere in the city,” said Dan Ammann, the CEO of Cruise.
Cruise started testing five vehicles in November this year. There is still an individual in the front passenger seat, but they have no manual control of the automobile. Ammann said he was “lucky enough” to be among the first passengers in one.
“It was wildly boring,” Ammann said. “The ride itself was extremely natural and predictable so it was kind of boring, but in all the right ways.”
In October, the California Department of Motor Vehicles allowed Cruise to test its autonomous vehicles without a safety driver in San Francisco. Cruise is a self-driving car developer mainly owned by General Motors, Honda Motor Co., and SoftBank.
The permit enables Cruise to test five driverless Chevrolet Bolt-based vehicles on particular streets. Cruise is the fifth company to get a driverless testing permit in California.
On Wednesday, Cruise published a 2½-minute video of the moment a safety driver steps out of the vehicle and a voice broadcasts, “all systems ready, engaging,” and the car takes off, making turns across the darkened streets of San Francisco at night to the excitement of Cruise developers watching.
The narrator describes that for more than five years Cruise has been driving the streets of San Francisco logging in 2 million miles of testing for the zero-emission autonomous cars.
“This is the beginning. There are not that many opportunities in life to work on a technology that’s going to disrupt the last 100 years of transportation,” said Kyle Vogt, Cruise co-founder, and chief technology officer, in the video. “And probably not an opportunity for any of us to work on a technology that will have such a positive impact on society and on humanity and this is our humble step in that direction.”
Ammann said Cruise will keep expanding the testing on a methodical basis slowly throughout the city, pulling back the curtain on what’s mainly been secret development.
“Our activity will be more visible externally and you’ll see the progress we’re making in a more tangible way. I think you’ll observe things move pretty quickly and next year will be a pretty exciting year.”
Cruise does have a group of people that remotely watches over the driverless cars for safety measures, but he refused to say whether they could take over the controls from the remote if something went wrong.
When General Motors was granted the permit for testing the driverless cars, GM CEO Mary Barra informed analysts that getting that green light in San Francisco is important to GM’s ability to advance its self-driving business.
