Cruises Safety Record Over 1 Million Driverless Miles

Table Of Content

• GM’s Cruise Rethinks Its Robotaxi Strategy After Admitting a Software Fault in Gruesome Crash
• Dense, urban testing meets low-speed retirement community testing
• Creating the AV Ecosystem
• The GM-backed company is one of the first to launch Level 4 vehicles in a dense, complex urban setting
• Driving cities forward
• The Cruise Safety Report: Advancing our safety mission through a transparent and holistic approach

At Cruise, we believe all vehicles, whether human-operated or autonomous, have a special responsibility to advance the safety of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) like pedestrians, cyclists, and other road users not in vehicles. We note that 5 out of the 36 driverless collisions involved VRUs coming in contact with an AV. However, in all 5 collisions, the VRU made contact with a stationary Cruise AV, and none of these collisions resulted in any reported injuries. During our operational pause over the last few months, Cruise maintained ongoing and extensive testing in complex, dynamic simulated environments and on closed courses, enabling continuous retraining and improvement.

GM’s Cruise Rethinks Its Robotaxi Strategy After Admitting a Software Fault in Gruesome Crash

To make streets safer, he said in an interview, cities should embrace self-driving cars like those designed by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors. They do not get distracted, drowsy or drunk, he said, and being programmed to put safety first meant they could substantially reduce car-related fatalities. I don’t typically hear AV companies talk about “unit economics” and profitability. Experts estimate that each self-driving car could cost upward of $300,000-$400,000, when taking into account the expensive sensors and computing software needed to allow the vehicles to drive themselves.

How Cruise went from buzzy self-driving startup to 'public safety risk' - Fast Company

How Cruise went from buzzy self-driving startup to 'public safety risk'.

Posted: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Dense, urban testing meets low-speed retirement community testing

They accuse Cruise of deploying its self-driving cars during the spring lockdown in defiance of public health orders banning nonessential travel. And they say Cruise isn’t doing enough to keep them safe during these public health crises. When you consider our safety record, the gravity of our team’s achievement comes into sharper focus.

Creating the AV Ecosystem

” Austin Fire Department captain Matthew McElearney wrote in an October email to city officials and Cruise liaisons. He asked the company to set up an “avoidance area” around the fire station to ensure no driverless vehicles would pass by; a representative for the company said Cruise would do so as it investigated. In late July, Cruise announced plans to expand its robotaxi service to Nashville. California’s Department of Motor Vehicles last week accused Cruise of omitting the dragging of the woman from a video of the incident it initially provided to the agency. The D.M.V. said the company had “misrepresented” its technology and told Cruise to shut down its driverless car operations in the state.

G.M.’s Cruise Moved Fast in the Driverless Race. It Got Ugly.

But since then, the company has been mired in a lengthy regulatory process before it can begin mass production. By leveraging this study, we were able to derive the approximate frequency of collisions by human-operated ridehail vehicles as fewer than 20,000 miles per collision in San Francisco. We were able to review the details of the collisions to determine additional characteristics, including whether the ridehail vehicle was the primary contributor to the collision, and whether the collision resulted in, or could have resulted in, a serious injury.

The GM-backed company is one of the first to launch Level 4 vehicles in a dense, complex urban setting

Initially, Cruise’s driverless autonomous offering will operate only between 10 p.m. But the limits are part of a plan by regulators and the company to prove out the safety and efficacy of its system before deploying it in more locations at additional times. The new operating window already extends its total active time by 1.5 hours as compared to the free driverless test pilot service it was offering between June of last year and the debut of this paid service.

Driving cities forward

Meanwhile, Cruise handled the sensing and computing technologies, as well as the experience from the rider’s standpoint. In October 2018, Honda announced its plan to invest $2.75 billion in Cruise over 12 years. Its official name is “Origin,” and Kyle Vogt, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Cruise, is clearly excited to be showing it off.

Our driving environment

With a broad smile, he reaches out and touches a button on the side, causing the doors to slide open with a little whoosh like something out of Star Wars. Vogt said that NHTSA is expected to make a decision soon on the company’s request, perhaps sometime later this month. Based on these three key areas of comparison, here is how our observed performance compares to the human benchmark.

The Cruise Safety Report: Advancing our safety mission through a transparent and holistic approach

This report, which is the AV industry’s most comprehensive and transparent report of its kind, goes into detail on how we protect and improve our safety performance on a daily basis. About 90% of these reported collisions involve more than one vehicle, so we’d need to count a collision for each vehicle involved. Many minor collisions are not even reported, so those are entirely missing from this statistic. Lastly, collisions occur much more frequently in dense urban environments such as San Francisco than the millions of miles of lightly trafficked rural roads and highways. For these and many other reasons, we needed better data than what is widely available. Based on this approach, human drivers drove approximately 515,000 miles for every reported collision in 2021.

Cruise has been working on the design of the Origin for over three years, but Honda’s involvement “super charged” the effort. The two automakers didn’t collaborate on every tiny detail; instead, they split up the work based on their expertise. GM was responsible for the base vehicle design and the electric powertrain, while Honda helped create the interior’s “efficient use of space,” Vogt says.

Google’s Firefly vehicle, audaciously designed by YooJung Ahn, is widely considered to be the first car tested publicly without a steering wheel or pedals. At Cruise, we know that our driverless AVs can move these tragic statistics in the opposite direction. Research from the RAND corporation indicates that even a modest improvement in safety by the first version of AVs could have a dramatic impact in saving lives. It projected that deploying AVs that are on average ten percent safer than the average human driver could prevent 600,000 fatalities in the United States over 35 years. Based on our first million driverless miles of operation, it appears we are on track to far exceed this projected safety benefit.

Technological issues aside, what really put Cruise in hot water late last year was its response to the incident. Regulators accused the company of withholding information about the crash, only sharing that a Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian who had been flung into its path after first being struck by a human-driven vehicle. Voyage is a spinoff from Udacity, an online learning service that offers courses in driverless technology.

Now, we are building on that work to create high-quality semantic maps and gather road information to ensure future operations meet elevated safety and performance targets. And because no two cities are the same, we plan to conduct this manual and supervised driving in multiple cities - starting with Phoenix - to expose our AVs to a diverse set of driving environments and conditions as we prepare for future driverless service. The era of commercial autonomous robotaxi service is here — Cruise officially became the first company to offer fared rides to the general public in a major city as of late Wednesday. The milestone comes after Cruise received official approval from the California Public Utilities Commission in early June to operate driverless in a commercial capacity. And though the fallout from the San Francisco collision has led to Cruise’s most recent troubles, it’s becoming clear that the robotaxi operator faced pushback from other cities as well. Two days later, Cruise went further and voluntarily suspended all of its driverless operations around the country, taking 400 or so driverless cars off the road.

Recouping those costs will be enormously challenging, and Cruise is trying to address that by building a car with more staying power than most personally owned vehicles. In a video released by the company, a Cruise employee is seen in the passenger seat while the car drives itself through the darkened streets of San Francisco. Cruise’s vehicles all have an emergency switch in the center channel near the gear shift in case something goes wrong, and they are also monitored remotely by Cruise employees. Asked whether remote operators are able to take control of the vehicle when needed, Ammann declined to answer. We remain committed to drive continuous safety improvements, magnify our impact with scale, and engage with our communities to create a safer, cleaner, and more accessible future in transportation. Over the past several weeks we have communicated directly with officials, first responders, and community leaders in cities we’ve previously operated in to share updates on our path forward.

Cruise was founded years after the Google self-driving project that became Waymo began, but it put riskier, urban driving at the center of its mission. Vogt has insisted that that strategy will be key to winning the driverless race. Waymo, now Cruise’s chief competitor, by contrast, started its initial Uber-like service in the suburbs of Phoenix, while Cruise launched driverless testing and service in more complex San Francisco.