Cruise has joined the growing ranks of self-driving technology companies removing human safety drivers from at least part of their test fleets.
The General Motors-backed company said Wednesday that the milestone ride occurred on a November night in the Sunset, a neighborhood on the western end of its San Francisco operational hub.
Cruise CEO Dan Ammann described the development as the first step in a gradual process that will see the scope of driverless operations grow in both number of driverless vehicles on the road and the area those vehicles can serve.
“We’re approaching ramp-up in a methodical and responsible manner, starting with a few cars in a few areas of the city,” Ammann said Wednesday. “We’ll expand on a steady and continuous basis.”
A permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles that Cruise obtained in October allows the company to have as many as five autonomous vehicles without human safety backups in its fleet.
Cruise is the fifth company to obtain a permit for driverless operations from the California DMV. The permit allows Cruise to test AVs without human safety operators in the vehicle on specified streets on which the speed limit does not exceed 30 mph.
As with others that hold the driverless permit — a group that includes Waymo, AutoX, Nuro and Zoox — the permit prohibits testing in heavy rain or heavy fog.
Across the industry, more companies are removing human safety backups in a handful of test vehicles.
Google affiliate Waymo removed safety drivers in a small number of vehicles in December 2018, and then expanded those rides to members of its Waymo One ride-hailing network in October across a 50-square-mile area of its metro Phoenix hub.
Cruise did not say how many square miles its initial driverless testing area would encompass.
Beyond Waymo, two Chinese companies, AutoX and Baidu, began driverless testing this month in Shenzhen and Beijing, respectively. Russian tech company Yandex began driverless testing in Ann Arbor, Mich., this year, and Motional — the joint venture linking Hyundai and Aptiv — received a permit for driverless testing in Nevada last month.
Ammann did not say whether there was a specific benchmark that Cruise reached which gave the company the confidence to begin removing human safety drivers.
Moreso, he pointed to a cumulative effort over five years and 2 million real-world test miles driven that he said established readiness.
Over the course of the next year, he said the company’s efforts would be to move from being “behind the curtain” to being more transparent in San Francisco.
“Our activity will be more visible, and you’ll see progress in a more tangible way,” he said. “There’s no specific additional timelines. But I think you’ll see things move relatively quickly, and next year will be a pretty exciting year.”
