As part of California’s Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service Pilot, Cruise has been granted a permit by the California Public Utilities Commissions which means that it can now transport passengers in autonomous vehicles.
Cruise is required to report any incidents to CPUC and provide data concerning how many passengers travel in the cars and the company’s safety protocol. The company is not permitted to make a charge for the autonomous vehicle travel and there must be a safety driver present on all rides.
Cruise is looking forward to having the opportunity to put some of their top partners, candidates and media representatives into these vehicles and have praised the program for facilitating this.
Cruise is the fifth company to be given a license to participate in the pilot alongside Pony.ai, Aurora, Zoox, Waymo and AutoX.
The program runs alongside that run by the California Department of Motor Vehicles which has already issued permits to allow 66 companies to test their autonomous vehicles.
Cruise scrapped the plan to launch a robotaxi service in 2019 because of technical issues and complications around creating the vehicle platform and customer ride-booking app. It remains to be seen if Cruise will move forward towards providing any kind of publicly available autonomous rides in the future.