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GM-backed Cruise opens robotaxi fleet up to public in one U.S. city
The General Motors-backed autonomous driving startup is moving from testing to commercial launch in San Francisco, but capacity is limited.
General Motors–backed autonomous driving startup Cruise said on Tuesday that it has opened up its self-driving car fleet in San Francisco to the public.
While capacity is limited with only a handful of cars available, the opportunity to sit in the back seat of a car that steers itself as if by ghostly hand is no longer reserved for a select few engineers, test drivers, and GM chief executive Mary Barra.
“We’re opening a sign-up page on our site today so you can get a driverless ride soon—and free, for now,“ Cruise interim CEO and cofounder Kyle Vogt said in a post. “We’re starting with a small number of users and will ramp up as we make more cars available.”
In a letter to shareholders, CEO Barra said, “This major milestone brings Cruise even closer to offering its first paid rides and generating $50 billion in annual revenue by the end of the decade.”
This follows an announcement in July from Ford and Lyft that they will debut robotaxis in Miami using the know-how of self-driving startup Argo AI. More recently, Intel subsidiary Mobileye in September revealed its plan to start a similar commercial fleet in Germany this year. Meanwhile, Alphabet's self-driving unit Waymo has already been chauffeuring passengers in Phoenix as part of its Waymo One service since 2020.
The race to develop autonomous driving technology has been a longer slog than many initially anticipated some five years ago. Tesla CEO Elon Musk famously predicted he’d already have 1 million robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020.
