Kyle Vogt, Co-Founder, President, and CTO of Cruise Automation Inc. , standing next to the driverless electric shuttle Cruise Origin during its unveiling event in San Francisco, California, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Cruise autonomous vehicle project, the vast majority owned by general motorsjust scored the final Allow Needed to provide robotaxi service for toll-paying passengers in San Francisco, the company announce Thursday.
Cruz boasted in a blog post that the authorization is “the first ever driverless deployment permit granted by the California Public Utilities Commission,” and makes the company the first to operate a “commercial driverless transportation service in a major US city.”
The company’s cars are entirely electric and powered by batteries, which is also a potential benefit for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. The company told CPUC in a letter dated April 2021 that it aims to make California’s roads safer and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Earlier, the California Department of Motor Vehicles approved deployment permits for autonomous vehicles for both Cruze and the alphabetWaymo.
Cruz was already showing Night ride to the public in San Francisco in its self-driving cars, though it has yet to require passengers to pay a fare.
former police Towing a driverless cruise vehicle In San Francisco, a video of the accident has spread widely. Despite the incident, as of late April, the department had not yet issued a traffic ticket to any driverless car operators, California DMV told CNBC.
Rodney Brooks, professor emeritus of robotics at MIT, rode in driverless taxis recently and wrote positively about the experience. on his blog.
In this post, he said, “Cruise has amassed MVP, a ‘minimally viable product’, the backbone of successful technology.” He also made it clear that he doesn’t think mass adoption of self-driving cars is imminent. He wrote, “We have ways to go so far, and mass adoption may not be in the form of the one-to-one replacement for the human leadership that has driven this dream over the past decade or more.”
Cruise’s competitors are also testing self-driving vehicles in San Francisco.
alphabet offered waymo Free rides without a driver For employees or members of the San Francisco testing program. It has also completed “tens of thousands” of driverless trips behind the wheel in Arizona.
Another driverless startup, focused on ferrying goods rather than passengers, Nuro has a publishing permit to operate driverless cars in San Francisco as well.
While Tesla CEO Elon Musk often touts the company’s ambitions to offer “ready to cab” cars, and Tesla’s max cars feature its full self-driving pilot, a pilot driver assistance system, which requires drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and stay alert to the road at all times .
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