After relaunching its operations in Phoenix and returning to the streets of Dallas, GM’s robotaxi company Cruise is now back in Houston with human drivers behind the wheel of its fleet of autonomous vehicles.
“Houston, we missed you!” exclaimed Cruise on social media as it announced its return to the Texas’ most populated city, where the company initially expanded its operations in May 2023. The autonomous vehicles will be driven by employees, and in the coming weeks, the cars will start piloting themselves on city streets, but with a safety driver on board for safety precautions. In addition, GM just injected another $850 million in the robotaxi subsidiary.
Cruise says supervised autonomous driving is a crucial phase prior to driverless vehicle deployment, and a seemingly necessary step to regain public trust after the company abruptly halted its operations last fall. In October 2023, a San Francisco pedestrian was unintentionally trapped and dragged underneath a Cruise AV unit after being struck by a human-driven vehicle. A settlement with the aforementioned pedestrian that landed somewhere in the $8 to $12 million range was recently reached.
Moving forward, it’s expected that the autonomous driving subsidiary will continue to expand its operations into the Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler areas as certain safety benchmarks are reached.
Prior to Cruise’s pause of operations and management reshuffling, which included the resignation of CEO and founder Kyle Vogt, the termination of several company execs and a 24 percent workforce reduction, more than 5 million driverless miles were recorded throughout 15 U.S. cities. Since then, Mo Elshenawy and Craig Glidden were both appointed as President and Chief Technology Officer, Steve Kenner was hired as the new Chief Safety Officer and Rob Grant has returned to the company as its Chief Government Affairs Officer.
Houston, we missed you! Today we’re resuming driving in Houston where we’ll build on the knowledge collected last year. We’ll start with human driven vehicles and move to supervised autonomous driving with a safety driver behind the wheel in the coming weeks, guided by safety. pic.twitter.com/jh9e7edFoK
— cruise (@Cruise) June 11, 2024
For the time being, Cruise will operate with its existing fleet of Chevy Bolt EV-based AVs, as GM decided to halt production of the Cruise Origin robotaxi, which has no steering wheel or driver controls. Units already built were sent to storage at GM’s Grand Blanc Tooling Center for the foreseeable future.
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