GM's Cruise Resumes Manual Driving As Next Step To Relaunch Robotaxis

(RTTNews) - Cruise LLC, the autonomous vehicle company owned by auto giant General Motors Co., announced its plan to resume manual driving as the next step in return to fully driverless operations.

The company, which had paused all its operations last year following an accident, now said manual driving will be resumed to create maps and gather road information in select cities, starting in Phoenix.

The work is done using human-driven vehicles without autonomous systems engaged, and is a critical step for validating its self-driving systems. Cruise expects the process to help inform where it ultimately will resume driverless operations.

Cruise, which was founded in 2013, had paused all its driverless operations in the United States since October last year, following an October 2 incident in which a pedestrian was struck and dragged by a Cruise vehicle in San Francisco.

Following the accident, the state of California had suspended the firm's license to operate driverless cars. Further, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a probe into pedestrian risks by Cruise. Amid the safety review of its U.S. fleet, Kyle Vogt, CEO and Co-Founder of Cruise, and co-founder Dan Kan both resigned from the firm. Further, the company in December dismissed nine key executives.

Cruise now said it has made significant progress, guided by new company leadership, recommendations from third-party experts, and a focus on a close partnership with the communities in which its vehicles operate.

Prior to the pause in operations, Cruise had provided hundreds of thousands of driverless trips to riders on complex city streets in San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin, Houston and elsewhere.

Cruise noted that during the operational pause over the last few months, it maintained ongoing and extensive testing in complex, dynamic simulated environments and on closed courses.

Now, starting with Phoenix, the company would conduct manual and supervised driving in multiple cities to expose its AVs to a diverse set of driving environments and conditions as part of its plan to resume driverless service.

Cruise in a blog post said, "Safety is the defining principle for everything we do and will guide our progress through this process. As we begin this work, we have requirements in place that not only cover the safety criteria, functions and roadworthiness of the vehicle, but also include robust incident response protocols and extensive training and ongoing performance monitoring for the operators behind the wheel."