Cruise, the project of GM, Honda, Softbank and others has announced it is now testing its vehicles in San Francisco “driverless” — ie. without a safety driver behind the wheel, acting on the permit they received for such testing from the state of California in October.
An image of a Cruise vehicle driving in San Francisco with nobody behind the wheel
While we recently saw big news of Waymo opening their ride service to the public with no safety drivers, and AutoX opening such a service in Shenzen, Cruise’s announcement is notable because the video shows it operating on urban streets, something not yet shown by other teams. At the same time, the demonstration video only appears to show driving done very late at night on almost empty streets, and says it was limited to “a few blocks.” It appears to be the Sunset district (I place I once resided, which is among the easier places to drive in San Francisco, and driving it at night is definitely not 40 times more complex than suburbs by day.) So while a big step, it is still just a first step. The vehicle in the video was being monitored from a control center, with Cruise’s CTO and CPO watching the pilot project deploy.
In addition, for the video shown has an engineer in the passenger seat with a laptop and an emergency stop button, so this person clearly has the ability to stop the vehicle and even grab the wheel. I have reached out to Cruise for clarification on whether this person is always there — if so, this is not really removing the safety driver. Indeed, Russian firm Yandex
Tests were done in modified Chevy Bolt electric cars, not in the custom “Origin” design. The important thing about this move, even on quiet streets at night, is it shows that the project has reached a level of confidence where the management and the lawyers are willing to stake the reputation of the project on its performance with no safety driver present. Even though there is a remote monitor watching every move with a kill switch, the company knows that an accident caused by one of these vehicles could seriously wound their project. It’s a transition every project has to make at some point, but it doesn’t mean it’s not scary, and it does mean that the company feels their vehicle is now extremely safe.
This makes this one of the most remarkable weeks of milestones in robocar history, including:
- AutoX no-driver service in Shenzen
- Waymo opening up taxi service to the general public near Phoenix
- Aurora merging with/acquiring Uber’s
UBER ATG self-driving unit - Some no-driver tests by Baidu
BIDU - The early reveal of the Zoox custom robotaxi
And the week’s not even over yet.
Cruise has long touted that by beginning with San Francisco, they were working on the real, harder problem. Others have taken the more incremental approach of starting in simpler environments then moving to the more complex. If you want to win in the taxi business, you are going to have to be able to handle downtowns, though there can still be a fair bit of business, if done right, in the easier places (and cities like Phoenix with simpler downtowns.) Nobody wants to cede the downtowns long-term, so it will be an interesting question as to whether Cruise will be ahead of Waymo at this final goal.
Waymo recently opened a large operations center in San Francisco, and has been testing there for a long time. Waymo also has permits to test in California unmanned, but has not used them. California recently announced a procedure to allow charging money for rides, but the process is complex and will take too much time — experimenting with billing is actually a very important part of this process, and it’s ironic that it may take more bureaucracy to do that than to run the unmanned vehicle.
Cruise infographic
Cruise reported it now has driven over 2 million test miles in their vehicles, quite a bit less than Waymo had when they took this step. Being in SF, they report they encounter 8.5K unprotected left turns each week and 3.2K cut-ins, plus have to go around 3K double parked vehicles. They estimate that city driving is “40 times” more complex than the suburbs but it is not clear how this is quantified, and would not be a fair description of the route in this test video. Prior to releasing on city streets they also did 1,000 test runs on their track and have been doing 200,000 hours of simulated driving per day (in urban situations that would be about 1-2 billion miles in a year.)
