Cruise has joined the growing ranks of self-driving technology companies removing human safety drivers from at least part of their test fleets.
 
But those safety operators won’t be going far. No longer behind the wheel, they will remain nearby – in the passenger’s seat, company officials said Wednesday  
 
“We recognize this is both a trust race as well as a tech race,” a Cruise spokesperson said. “We will maintain a safety operator in the passenger seat. The safety operator has the ability to bring the vehicle to a stop in the event of an emergency, but does not have access to standard driver controls.”
 
Meanwhile, executives at the General Motors-backed company lauded the removal of humans from behind the wheel as signal of progress. It comes after five years of testing in San Francisco in which Cruise vehicles accumulated more than 2 million real-world miles of testing.
 
Cruise said the first ride with no human behind the wheel occurred on a November night in the Sunset, a neighborhood on the western end of its San Francisco operational hub.
 
Cruise CEO Dan Ammann described the development as the first step in a gradual process that will see the scope of driverless operations grow in both number of driverless vehicles on the road and the area those vehicles can serve.
 
“We’re approaching ramp-up in a methodical and responsible manner, starting with a few cars in a few areas of the city,” Ammann said Wednesday. “We’ll expand on a steady and continuous basis.”

GM shares gained 1.4 percent to close at $44.41 on Wednesday.

For now, it appears Cruise’s focus remains on technological progress for its self-driving system. The Sunset neighborhood is located on the western fringe of the city; heat maps of ride-hailing demand maintained by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority show the highest demand for service on the eastern edge of the city. 

Sam Abuelsamid, principal research analyst at Guidehouse Insights, noted that Cruise is starting simple. 

“They’re doing this at night with a minimal amount of traffic on the road and no pedestrians moving around,” he said. “They’re moving through a static environment. Which, when you are getting started, is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I’d much rather see that than what Tesla is doing. But it’s not a big breakthrough.”

He suggested the timing on moving human safety backups from one seat to another may have more to do with funding than Cruise reaching a technical benchmark.  

“What they’re doing right now is apparently a milestone in their funding agreements that they needed to get the next tranche of funding, which they had to renegotiate when they missed their original timeline of launching a commercial service in 2019,” Abuelsamid said. “So this is just an arbitrary milepost that doesn’t necessarily represent anything significant – one way or the other – in terms of their technological maturity.”

A permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles that Cruise obtained in October allows the company to have as many as five autonomous vehicles without human safety backups in its fleet.

Specific terms

Cruise is the fifth company to obtain a permit for driverless operations from the California DMV. The permit allows Cruise to test AVs without human safety operators in the vehicle on specified streets on which the speed limit does not exceed 30 mph.

As with others that hold the driverless permit — a group that includes Waymo, AutoX, Nuro and Zoox — the permit prohibits testing in heavy rain or heavy fog.

Across the industry, more companies are removing human safety backups in a handful of test vehicles.

Google affiliate Waymo removed safety drivers in a small number of vehicles in December 2018, and then expanded those rides to members of its Waymo One ride-hailing network in October across a 50-square-mile area of its metro Phoenix hub.

Cruise did not say how many square miles its initial driverless testing area would encompass.

Other operations

Beyond Waymo, two Chinese companies, AutoX and Baidu, began driverless testing this month in Shenzhen and Beijing, respectively. Motional — the joint venture linking Hyundai and Aptiv — received a permit for driverless testing in Nevada last month.

Perhaps the company with the testing that most closely resembles Cruise moving its safety operators out of the driver’s seat is Russian tech company Yandex, which moved its human safety backups to the rear seats in some Ann Arbor, Mich., test vehicles earlier this year. 

Ammann did not say whether there was a specific benchmark that Cruise reached which gave the company the confidence to begin removing human safety drivers.

Moreso, he pointed to a cumulative effort over five years and 2 million real-world test miles driven that he said established readiness.

Over the course of the next year, he said the company’s efforts would be to move from being “behind the curtain” to being more transparent in San Francisco.

“Our activity will be more visible, and you’ll see progress in a more tangible way,” he said. “There’s no specific additional timelines. But I think you’ll see things move relatively quickly, and next year will be a pretty exciting year.”