Fast Facts
- Cruise resuming operations comes after a several month stop in operation after California pulled the permit allowing the GM-owned brand to operate.
- The vehicles are back on the road in Phoenix, but with one major change.
After halting the operation of self-driving vehicles across the United States in October 2024, Cruise is coming back. While the fleet still consists of cars with custom branding and self-driving capabilities, they will not be driven alone.
The company is resuming operations with “manual driving” focusing on creating maps for the locale and learning about the roads. In a blog post announcing the resumption, Cruise writes: “This work is done using human-driven vehicles without autonomous systems engaged, and is a critical step for validating our self-driving systems as we work towards returning to our driverless mission.”
Related: Driverless car company explains urgent reason it ceased operating
You may recall that Cruise had to pause its operations across the United States after its permit to test and operate driverless vehicles was pulled in California. That came after it was discovered that the GM-owned and operated driverless car operation initially misrepresented an incident in which a Cruise vehicle hit a pedestrian. With that pause, Cruise suspended operations in San Francisco as well as Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, and Phoenix.
While GM Cruise was previously steadfastly focused on self-driving and driver-less robotaxis, it’s clear it is going back to basics. This move may inspire more consumer confidence and hopefully build up a better training set of data to improve performance.
This restart also comes shortly after Elon Musk announced via X (formerly Twitter) that Tesla will unveil its robotaxi on Aug. 8, 2024. With driver-operated vehicles and a large amount of data gathering, Cruise is hoping to set a higher bar on performance and safety. It’s clear that GM eventually wants the Cruise vehicles to return to robotaxi form, as the blog post also noted that the cars will be tested on closed courses before being set on public roads.
You can see the full blog post from Cruise here, and we’ll update if more details emerge on an expansion of driver-operated rides and if we get a formal date of a return to self-driving confirmed.
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