Cruise is postponing an ambitious target to launch a commercial robotaxi service before the end of the year, the company’s CEO Dan Ammann said Wednesday in a lengthy blog post that revealed new details about its plan to eventually deploy in San Francisco.
Cruise is now throwing its weight — which includes a treasure chest of more than 1,500 employees and $7.25 billion from majority shareholder GM, Softbank Vision Fund, automaker Honda and T. Rowe Price & Associates — towards a large scale deployment that “gets it right the first time,” Ammann told TechCrunch in a recent interview.
For the self-driving company, this means a steep ramp up in testing and validation of its autonomous vehicles, community outreach, investment in infrastructure that includes a massive electric charging station in San Francisco, and the development of a next-generation self-driving vehicle by a team of Cruise, GM and Honda engineers.
“From the beginning, the approach at Cruise was to do this safely and to do this at a very large scale,” Cruise CEO Dan Ammann told TechCrunch. “There’s a technology race going on here, but there’s also a trust race going on as well. It’s really important that when we do this the first time, that we do it right.”
Ammann declined to give a new timeline for the commercial service that will first launch in San Francisco.
The decision not only provides a glimpse into Cruise’s operations, it reflects a broader trend in the nascent autonomous vehicle industry. Engineers and executives within the industry, once brazenly forecasting the imminent arrival of self-driving cars (without a human safety driver behind the wheel) have a decidedly more restrained outlook.
Cruise had one of the most aggressive timelines among companies hoping to deploy a commercial self-driving vehicle service. And even while other companies adjusted deployment plans, Cruise stuck to its timeline until now.
“It seemed highly unlikely that Cruise would meet that 2019 and not just because of the technical challenges,” Gartner analyst Mike Ramsey said in a recent interview, adding that company faced more pragmatic challenges such as designing a vehicle platform and launching a ride-hailing app and business.
“It’s further evidence that the ambitions for transitioning the world to self driving vehicles is unlikely to be as near term as some thought,” Ramsey said.
However, Ramsey noted that new details revealed Wednesday by Cruise does show a company that is thinking beyond just solving the technical juggernaut of autonomous vehicles and making some progress on how the service might function.
Developing.
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