Photo: Cruise
City after city, GM’s Cruise robotaxi service is expanding across the U.S., with Phoenix, Arizona, and Austin, Texas, as the latest cities where it began operations. Cruise, thus, kept an earlier promise to have driverless taxis operating in three U.S. cities by the end of the year.
A few years ago, the idea that cars would drive themselves seemed crazy. Sure, Tesla has promised full self-driving vehicles for years, but there’s always something that delays a breakthrough until “next year.” Other self-driving projects have already given up, and Argo AI, backed by Ford and Volkswagen, is the best example. On the other hand, GM still presses ahead with its Cruise robotaxi service, which, according to its CEO Kyle Vogt, has seen exponential advancements.
In September, Cruise pledged to launch robotaxi services in two more cities, namely Phoenix, AZ, and Austin, TX. This was only three months after Cruise started commercial service in San Francisco. However hard to believe it is, Kyle Vogt announced that Cruise had completed its first paid rides for members of the public in both Phoenix and Austin. The service is only available in a small service area in each city for now, but it will gradually expand, as it happened in San Francisco.
Based on the SF experience, people expected this rollout to take months or even years. Nevertheless, because Cruise already has experience doing this in SF, the rollout happened much faster in the new cities. As Vogt likes to brag on Twitter, in Austin, the team went from zero infrastructure, with no maps, charging facilities, or test vehicles, to fully functional driverless rides in about 90 days.
“Our system is almost entirely ML-based, so adapting to a new city is mostly data collection, mining, and model retraining,” wrote Kyle Vogt on Twitter. “We invest heavily in tools for engineering efficiency at @Cruise, so it took just a few weeks to collect data to retrain our ML models and see performance meet our targets. This process is becoming increasingly automated, in some cases requiring no engineer intervention.”
In Austin, Cruise will initially operate in downtown and central Austin, Wednesday to Friday, between 10 pm and 5:30 am. Cruise robotaxi services in Arizona will deploy first in Chandler, a city southeast of Phoenix. The rides are open to the public from Monday to Friday, between 7 pm and 2 am. Cruise is also operating a delivery service across the Phoenix area. Its robotaxi service will compete with Waymo, which has been serving the area since 2018.
The data gathered in Phoenix and Austin has, incredibly, improved operations in San Francisco. The difference it brought was so striking that Vogt said the Cruise team was pleasantly surprised. He fully expects this trend to continue as the service expands to more cities. Until then, the Cruise driverless service already feels polished enough, with rides today being totally different from those from only a couple of months ago.
No matter how advanced Cruise driverless cars seem, they are still causing headaches for city traffic and sometimes even crashes. Cruise is currently under NHTSA’s scrutiny after its vehicles were reported to stop suddenly for no reason, endangering other road users. The investigation follows a long line of mischief in San Francisco, including a crash in June. Hopefully, autonomous driving will become more competent and safe enough to surpass humans in this regard.
In September, Cruise pledged to launch robotaxi services in two more cities, namely Phoenix, AZ, and Austin, TX. This was only three months after Cruise started commercial service in San Francisco. However hard to believe it is, Kyle Vogt announced that Cruise had completed its first paid rides for members of the public in both Phoenix and Austin. The service is only available in a small service area in each city for now, but it will gradually expand, as it happened in San Francisco.
Based on the SF experience, people expected this rollout to take months or even years. Nevertheless, because Cruise already has experience doing this in SF, the rollout happened much faster in the new cities. As Vogt likes to brag on Twitter, in Austin, the team went from zero infrastructure, with no maps, charging facilities, or test vehicles, to fully functional driverless rides in about 90 days.
“Our system is almost entirely ML-based, so adapting to a new city is mostly data collection, mining, and model retraining,” wrote Kyle Vogt on Twitter. “We invest heavily in tools for engineering efficiency at @Cruise, so it took just a few weeks to collect data to retrain our ML models and see performance meet our targets. This process is becoming increasingly automated, in some cases requiring no engineer intervention.”
In Austin, Cruise will initially operate in downtown and central Austin, Wednesday to Friday, between 10 pm and 5:30 am. Cruise robotaxi services in Arizona will deploy first in Chandler, a city southeast of Phoenix. The rides are open to the public from Monday to Friday, between 7 pm and 2 am. Cruise is also operating a delivery service across the Phoenix area. Its robotaxi service will compete with Waymo, which has been serving the area since 2018.
The data gathered in Phoenix and Austin has, incredibly, improved operations in San Francisco. The difference it brought was so striking that Vogt said the Cruise team was pleasantly surprised. He fully expects this trend to continue as the service expands to more cities. Until then, the Cruise driverless service already feels polished enough, with rides today being totally different from those from only a couple of months ago.
No matter how advanced Cruise driverless cars seem, they are still causing headaches for city traffic and sometimes even crashes. Cruise is currently under NHTSA’s scrutiny after its vehicles were reported to stop suddenly for no reason, endangering other road users. The investigation follows a long line of mischief in San Francisco, including a crash in June. Hopefully, autonomous driving will become more competent and safe enough to surpass humans in this regard.
We promised we’d go driverless in 3 cities by the end of this year, and WE DID IT! @Cruise is now live in SF, Austin, and Phoenix.
— Kyle Vogt (@kvogt) December 20, 2022
Folks, we are entering the golden years of AV expansion.
More about this launch: pic.twitter.com/guocKlWmf4
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