Cruise CEO Dan Amman announced yesterday that his company will test fully driverless vehicles on the streets of San Francisco “before the end of this year.”
The post heavily emphasizes the environmentally friendly nature of Cruise’s all-electric fleet, including its Origin prototype vehicle.
“Single occupant, human-driven, gasoline-powered cars are the second largest contributors of greenhouse gases on Earth…burning fossil fuels is no way to build the future of transportation.”
A video by Cruise founder and CTO Kyle Vogt accompanies that announcement. Vogt mentions that Cruise has accumulated “over a million miles of fully autonomous driving, in complex urban environments.”
That seems much lower than I would’ve guessed, so much so that I wonder if it was a mis-statement. Given Waymo’s record of over 20 million autonomous miles, I would assume Cruise would want something closer to that before putting fully autonomous vehicles on the road.
Combined with Waymo’s recent move to open driverless vehicles in Phoenix to the public, it’s been a great week for self-driving cars.
David Silver 