Cruise has begun testing its autonomous vehicles in Phoenix, with plans to begin “supervised” driving in the city more than six months after self-driving subsidiary GM halted its driverless operations in the United States.
Cruise announced Monday in a blog post that it will begin testing two vehicles in autonomous mode on public roads in metro Phoenix. A human safety operator will be behind the wheel during this phase of testing, according to the company. Another eight autonomous Cruise vehicles will continue to be driven manually in the area. Cruise said it is focused on validating the technology against predefined AV safety and performance requirements. The company described it as a “critical validation phase” and will gradually expand to other Phoenix suburbs, including Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert and Chandler.
Cruise’s resumption of operations has been slow and — for now — focused on Phoenix rather than San Francisco, where it is based. In April, the company began mapping and gathering road information in self-driving vehicles.
Monday’s announcement marks a small but significant moment in Cruise’s efforts to overcome the Oct. 2 incident in San Francisco that left a pedestrian pinned down and then swept away by one of his robots. That fact, combined with the company’s response, led California regulators to suspend Cruise’s driverless installation and testing permits, effectively ending robotaxi operations in the state where most of its operations were located.
Within weeks, Cruise had suspended all operations, which included tests in Austin and Miami. In an effort to rebuild trust, the company fired senior executives, stacked its board with GM executives and hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to look into the incident. Co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt resigned and eventually 24% of the workforce was laid off.
The company’s report, released in January, concluded that Cruise did not intentionally mislead regulators. Instead, a lack of judgment, leadership mistakes, an us-versus-them relationship with regulators, and a fixation on correcting the media’s inaccurate narrative that the Cruise AV, not the human-centric Nissan, had caused the accident were all factors. that contributed to Cruz’s problems, according to the 195-page report.
