General Motors has launched a service that allows employees to use a driverless car to take them anywhere in San Francisco. At the heart of this service is Cruise Automation, a company own by GM, which specialises in developing self-driving modifications for production vehicles.
The “Cruise Anywhere” service is still currently in a beta phase but it is available for seven days a week. The service is simple to use, and has functions Similar to that of other ride hailing services. Cruise mentioned that 10% GM employees in San Francisco are using the service, with more signing up each week.
“We’ve always said we’d launch first with a rideshare application, and this is in line with that and just further evidence of that. We’re really excited about how the technology is evolving, and the rate at which it’s evolving. This is a manifestation of that putting the app in people’s hands and having them use it for the first time and make AVs their primary form of transportation,”Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt told TechCrunch in an interview.
Having real passengers in driverless cars is essential as this is the best avenue to gauge the reaction of passengers as well as find out potential bugs in the system. Using employees is even better because that way it doesn’t create such a huge public relations nightmare if anything were to go wrong.
[Source: TechCrunch & Wired]
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