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GM’s Cruise Launches Daytime Driverless Rides: Video

General Motors’ autonomous vehicle technology division, Cruise, has announced that it is now conducting fully driverless rides during the daytime.

Previously, Cruise was restricting its driverless rides to the nighttime. By contrast, these new daytime rides will serve as a more challenging test for Cruise’s autonomous technology, given the higher traffic density and other factors present during the day.

Cruise announced the new daytime autonomous rides with a brief video posted to social media. The video features Cruise Senior Business Systems Analyst Tatiana Feijoo and Cruise Staff System Test Engineer Alexis Tuason, who served as the first passengers to take a fully autonomous daytime ride with Cruise’s test fleet.

“This is heavy traffic here right now and we’re doing it,” Feijoo says as the Chevy Bolt EV test vehicle gets underway.

“See, this is the kind of traffic that would make me really frustrated if I was driving,” Tuason says.

For now, Cruise’s fully autonomous daytime service area is considerably restricted compared to its fully autonomous nighttime service area. However, according to Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, the daytime service area will eventually merge with the nighttime service area.

Earlier this summer, Cruise announced that it would start charging customers for rides in its fleet of fully autonomous Chevy Bolt EV test vehicles in San Francisco. Members of the public can use a smartphone app to order rides in the driverless vehicles, similar to rideshare apps like Uber or Lyft. Cruise is restricting the number of users that can sign up for its ride-hailing service to prevent the system from being flooded, which would negatively affect the company’s logistics.

“No major city has had driverless cars running around in it, so there’s a lot of acclimation that communities have to do, law enforcement, we want to make sure everyone’s ready for this,” Cruise CEO Vogt said this summer. “So we started small with a limited area, and very quickly you’re going to see us expand to the point where we’re covering all of San Francisco.”

Cruise aims to eventually launch a fleet of fully driverless vehicles via the Cruise Origin robotaxi.

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Jonathan is an automotive journalist based out of Southern California. He loves anything and everything on four wheels.

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Comments

  1. GM is doing what Ford said is impossible.

    Reply
    1. Right getting stuck in intersections and blocking traffic.

      Reply
    2. The question is – how long before it is profitable?

      For is still working on autonomy. They wanted to split the cost through Argo with VW and Amazon, but Amazon backed out.

      GM seems as though they are still working hard to erase the black eye they got from the BS documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” Ford is being pragmatic and lowkey with hybrids, plug in hybrids, and a less expensively developed and tooled electric truck. (Compared to GM’s Hummer, which only seems to exist for the purpose of embarrassing the Cybertruck)

      Reply
  2. Cruise couldn’t get their crap together when they had the streets to themselves at night now they are unleashing this on daytime traffic? Disaster waiting to happen. I see cruise going the way of Argo.

    Reply

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