Cruise, the self-driving unit of General Motors (GM), has announced plans to commence testing its autonomous vehicles on public roads in Phoenix, Arizona. This move marks Cruise’s reentry into the driverless robotaxi business, with a new approach involving supervised operations.
The company has been gathering road information and mapping Phoenix for several weeks in preparation for this phase. Cruise will now validate its autonomous vehicles’ end-to-end behaviors against its safety and performance standards, with the vehicles being supervised by a safety driver during testing.
This week, we’re excited to begin supervised autonomous driving in Phoenix. During this phase, our cars drive autonomously, with a safety driver behind the wheel to monitor and take over if needed. Safety continues to be the defining principle for everything we do, and supervised…
— cruise (@Cruise) May 13, 2024
In a blog post, Cruise emphasized the importance of supervised autonomous driving as a critical validation phase before deploying driverless vehicles. The company aims to ensure safe performance in real-world driving scenarios, building on its extensive work in simulation and closed-course driving, as well as its previous experience with over 5 million driverless miles.
While the initial testing will take place in Phoenix, Cruise plans to gradually expand its supervised autonomous driving operations to other cities in Arizona, including Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler.
Cruise’s reentry into autonomous vehicle testing comes after a setback last year when one of its autonomous cars was involved in a pedestrian accident in San Francisco. Following the incident, which occurred when a woman was struck by a human-driven car and thrown into the path of a Cruise robotaxi, the company faced regulatory challenges, including the suspension of its license to operate an autonomous robotaxi fleet in California.
