Cruise In Dubai!

Big news from Cruise yesterday!

Our mission is to deliver better transportation to everyone. Today we’re announcing @rta_dubai selected Cruise to be its exclusive provider of self-driving ridehail services, making Dubai our first international destination for commercial deployment. https://t.co/hFix3oEdLD pic.twitter.com/hoqofmDK0o

— cruise (@Cruise) April 12, 2021

An interesting aspect of the press release is the importance of Cruise’s electric fleet, which the Dubai Road and Transport Authority predicts will help the region meet its goal of 12% pollution reduction.

My colleague Oliver Cameron (who is hiring, by the way) took to Twitter to expand on the partnership:

This is a bigger deal than it may seem:

✅ Dubai is one of the largest ride-hail markets in the world
✅ @Cruise has contractual exclusivity until 2029
✅ 4,000(!) @Cruise Origin vehicles to be deployedhttps://t.co/xkJX1wsKSk

— Oliver Cameron (@olivercameron) April 13, 2021

Our CEO, Dan Ammann, appeared on Bloomberg News to discuss the partnership. The anchors asked him about a driverless launch in the US and he said:

“Well, it’s 2021. We’ve begun driverless testing, we’re making rapid progress with the Cruise Origin, we’ve talked about beginning operations in Dubai in 2023. So you can infer that a US launch will happen sometime in the middle there.”

Dan Ammann, CEO Cruise

Unrelated to Dubai, Dan (I think I can call him Dan) praised Voyage in the Bloomberg interview:

“The Voyage team is a super-talented and experienced team and we’re really pleased and thrilled to have had them join us in the Cruise mission.”

That makes me happy 🙂

I was also amused that Dan’s setting and wardrobe for the interview matched what we see every company meeting. Authenticity!