Cruise, the self-driving car company, has announced that its fully driverless vehicles have traveled over one million miles in just 15 months since the company’s first fully driverless ride. The majority of these miles were driven in San Francisco, where Cruise launched its robotaxis in November 2021.
Cruise’s strategy since its inception in 2013 has been to automate vehicles in the most difficult driving environments first so that its autonomous driving system could be rolled out to cities that are easier to drive in. San Francisco’s notoriously challenging driving conditions made it an ideal location for Cruise to begin its autonomous vehicle testing.
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For every driverless mile that Cruise logs in San Francisco, the company gains valuable data on complex driving scenarios that help to improve its technology. San Francisco’s dense and often chaotic streets, with about 19,000 people per mile, provide Cruise’s fleet with an abundance of information-rich data to learn from.
Cruise’s Mo Elshenawy, EVP of engineering, says that San Francisco provides many unique challenges that have helped to improve the company’s autonomous driving system. Stop sign blow-throughs are 46 times more frequent in San Francisco than in suburban areas, and double-parked vehicles and cut-ins are everyday norms of San Francisco traffic.
In December 2022, Cruise expanded its driverless operations to Austin and Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. Remarkably, it took Cruise just 90 days to go from having no infrastructure in Austin to beginning to give driverless rides.
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Elshenawy says that Cruise processes five petabytes of simulation data every day. This data, along with the road data that the company collects, helps to train new AI models that continuously improve upon the performance of older ones.
Cruise has recently begun testing its purpose-built Origin vehicle on public roads in San Francisco. Origin is a fully autonomous vehicle with no front seat or steering wheel, designed specifically for giving autonomous taxi rides.
Cruise’s milestone of one million miles with fully driverless vehicles is an exciting development in the autonomous vehicle industry. With continued advancements in technology and the expansion of driverless operations to new cities, the future of self-driving cars looks promising.
