Cruise is postponing an ambitious target to launch a commercial robotaxi service before the end of the year, the company’s CEO Dan Ammann said Wednesday in a lengthy blog post that revealed new details about its plan to eventually deploy in San Francisco.
Cruise is now throwing its weight — which includes a treasure chest of more than 1,500 employees and $7.25 billion from majority shareholder GM along with Softbank Vision Fund, automaker Honda and T. Rowe Price & Associates — towards a large scale deployment that “gets it right the first time,” Ammann told TechCrunch in a recent interview.
For the self-driving company, this means a steep ramp up in testing and validation of its autonomous vehicles, community outreach, investment in infrastructure that includes a massive electric charging station in San Francisco, and the development of a next-generation self-driving vehicle by a team of Cruise, GM and Honda engineers.
“From the beginning, the approach at Cruise was to do this safely and to do this at a very large scale,” Ammann told TechCrunch. “There’s a technology race going on here, but there’s also a trust race going on as well. It’s really important that when we do this the first time, that we do it right.”
Ammann declined to give a new timeline for when the commercial service will launch in San Francisco. He did say San Francisco residents should expect to see a lot more of its self-driving vehicles on the road.
Logging more test miles is just part of Cruise’s broader plan to increase its visibility in San Francisco and move towards a commercial service, according to Ammann. The company’s 180 test vehicles, which are GM’s electric Chevy Bolt EVs, will be rebranded in a splashy orange with the Cruise name emblazoned on the side and a smaller personal name towards the back. For instance, the Cruise vehicle in the main photo has been dubbed Poppy.
The company will also increase community outreach in San Francisco, a plan that will mean increased marketing as well as educational meetups where residents can ask questions and check out the vehicles.
The decision to scrap its 2019 launch date not only provides a glimpse into Cruise’s operations, it reflects a broader trend in the nascent autonomous vehicle industry. Engineers and executives within the industry, once brazenly forecasting the imminent arrival of self-driving cars (without a human safety driver behind the wheel) have a decidedly more restrained outlook.
Cruise had one of the most aggressive timelines among companies hoping to deploy a commercial self-driving vehicle service. And even while other companies adjusted deployment plans, Cruise stuck to its timeline until now.
“It seemed highly unlikely that Cruise would meet that 2019 and not just because of the technical challenges,” Gartner analyst Mike Ramsey said in a recent interview, adding that company faced more pragmatic challenges such as designing a vehicle platform and launching a ride-hailing app and business.
“It’s further evidence that the ambitions for transitioning the world to self driving vehicles is unlikely to be as near term as some thought,” Ramsey said.
However, Ramsey noted that new details revealed Wednesday by Cruise does show a company that is thinking beyond just solving the technical juggernaut of autonomous vehicles and making some progress on how the service might function.
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