General Motors’ Cruise is repositioning its robotaxis in Phoenix after a nearly five-month shutdown, the company said in a blog post. The catch; The cars will be in “manual mode”, so they won’t drive themselves.
Cruise will continue manually driving its autonomous vehicles to create maps and collect traffic information in certain cities, starting in Phoenix, the company announced Tuesday. The GM subsidiary already had a presence in Phoenix before pulling out its entire US-based fleet last year after an incident in San Francisco left a pedestrian pinned down and swept away by a Cruise robotaxi.
Prior to this incident, Cruise had been announcing new city launches — including Dallas, Houston and Miami — at a surprising pace. Critics accused the company of expanding too quickly and reducing security.
Now Cruise seems to be going back to basics, a sharp turn away from the aggressive development strategy followed by the company in recent years. In 2022, former Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt — who resigned amid last year’s controversy — told investors that Cruise had “de-risking the technical approach“ applying what worked well in San Francisco to similar ride-share markets.
In a suspension Posted on Tuesday that it says could have been written in 2018, Cruise explains how it must first detect high-fidelity location data for road features and map information such as speed limits and lane paint so the AV can understand where it is in relation to with his environment. The post then describes how Cruise will eventually return to fully autonomous operations: slowly, under human supervision, and with ongoing validation of the technology.
All of these steps are part and parcel of building and expanding a self-driving car business, which leaves us wondering if Cruise is clarifying the obvious for the public’s benefit, or if its new security team is scrapping its old technology and starting over ;
A Cruise spokesman declined to comment on the company’s strategy.
The October incident wasn’t the first time Cruise’s technology has caused problems. Even as Cruise expanded to new cities in the second half of 2023, robotaxis were routinely malfunctioning in cities like San Francisco and Austin, disrupting traffic flow, public transit and first aid.
Technology issues aside, what really landed Cruise in hot water late last year was her response to the incident. Regulators accused the company of withholding information about the crash, disclosing only that a Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian who flew into its path after first being struck by a human vehicle. ONEn internal reference conducted by the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and released in January, confirmed that Cruise’s employees were not forthcoming about what happened after Cruise’s vehicle ran over the pedestrian, just days later revealing that his sweater maneuver robotaxi resulted in the pedestrian being dragged for 20 feet.
The mishandling of information resulted in the parent company GM is cutting costs and downloading greater cruise control.
A big part of Cruise’s strategy going forward, as outlined in Tuesday’s blog post, includes reforming and creating updated incident response and crisis management protocols to ensure more effective and transparent responses in the future. The company says it will also work on improved engagement with first responders to facilitate training in each region where it plans to operate.
Cruise has not announced when or where it will continue to operate without a driver. The company’s main operations have historically been in San Francisco, but Cruise lost its operating licenses there after the accident. Cruise began to expand paid service area in the Phoenix area in August 2023. Alphabet’s Waymo — Cruise’s main competitor that still operates in San Francisco — has operated a paid driverless robotaxi service in the area since 2020, and last year doubled its service area in downtown Phoenix and launched driverless rides at the airport.
