Cruise has got approval for a commercial robotaxi service in San Francisco

• Cruise, General Motors’ majority-owned autonomous vehicle unit, revealed on Thursday
• It had received final licences to run a commercial robotaxi service in San Francisco.
• After the California DMV approved autonomous vehicle deployments by Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo.
• The California Public Utilities Commission gave Cruise its permission.
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Cruise, a General Motors-owned autonomous vehicle business, announced on Thursday that it had received the final authorization required to operate its cruise robotaxi service to paying clients in San Francisco.

In a blog post, Cruise said that the permit is “the first-ever Driverless Deployment Permit granted by the California Public Utilities Commission,” and that the business will be the first to operate a “commercial, driverless ridehail service in a major US metropolis.”

The company’s automobiles are totally electric and battery-powered, which could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. In an April 2021 letter to the CPUC, the business stated that it seeks to make California roadways safer while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

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Previously, the California Department of Motor Vehicles issued permits for both Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo to operate autonomous vehicles.

Cruise was already providing public midnight trips in its autonomous cars in San Francisco, though passengers have yet to pay a charge.

A Cruise autonomous vehicle was previously pulled over by police in San Francisco, and a video of the incident went viral. Despite that occurrence, the California DMV told CNBC that as of late April, the department had yet to issue a traffic penalty to any autonomous vehicle operator.

Rodney Brooks, emeritus professor of robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently travelled in Cruise driverless taxis and commented positively about the experience on his blog.

He said, in that post, “Cruise has put together an MVP, a ‘Minimal Viable Product,’ the lynchpin of successful tech.” He also specified that he does not believe mass adoption of driverless cars is near. He wrote, “We have a ways to go yet, and mass adoption might not be in the form of one-for-one replacement of human driving that has driven this dream for the last decade or more.”

In San Francisco, competitors to Cruise are also testing driverless vehicles.

Alphabet’s Waymo has provided free driverless rides to staff or members of a San Francisco testing programme. In Arizona, it has also completed “tens of thousands” of rides without a driver.

Nuro, another driverless startup that focuses on moving cargo rather than passengers, has a deployment authorization to run driverless cars in San Francisco as well.

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While Tesla CEO Elon Musk frequently touts the company’s ambitions to deliver “robotaxi-ready” vehicles, Tesla vehicles only feature its Full Self Driving Beta programme, an experimental driver assistance system that requires drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and remain attentive to the road at all times.

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