Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company owned by General Motors, will launch robotaxi service in Phoenix, Arizona, and Austin, Texas before the end of 2022, the company’s CEO said today.
The company currently operates a ride-hailing service in just one city, San Francisco, where earlier this year it won permission to charge customers for rides. It took years to expand this service; Cruise now says it can do the same thing in two new cities in 90 days.
The company has been conducting autonomous testing in Phoenix as part of a supply partnership with Walmart. But it has yet to deploy any vehicles in Austin, which Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt described as unprecedented.
“This is something people thought might take years”
“What’s really exciting to me is that we’re going from zero footprints — no map, no on-site infrastructure — to our first revenue-generating driverless rides in Austin in about 90 days,” Vogt said during a speech at a Goldman Sachs conference Monday . “This is something that people thought could take years.”
In fact, it took Cruise years to launch its paid driverless taxi service in San Francisco. The company originally planned to launch a commercial robotaxi service there in 2019, but fell through after realizing the technology was not quite mature.
Cruise currently offers a range of services in San Francisco, from day trips in its autonomous vehicles with safety drivers at the wheel, to night trips in its fully driverless cars. (The company is currently prohibited from offering driverless rides during the day.)
Currently, only a handful of AV operators have actually deployed fully driverless vehicles, also known as Level 4 autonomous vehicles, on public roads. Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving unit, has been operating its Level 4 vehicles in the Phoenix suburbs for a number of years, including rides by paying customers. And there are plans to roll out a paid service in San Francisco and surrounding cities in the coming months.
Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, is testing its L4 vehicles in Las Vegas. Yandex, the Russian tech giant, tested its Level 4 vehicles in Las Vegas during the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show, but suspended its operations in the US after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And Chinese tech company Baidu began testing its vehicles without safety drivers in its home country in late 2020.
In today’s comments, Vogt indicated that Cruise’s relationship with GM gives the company an advantage over its competitors thanks to its expertise in manufacturing vehicles at scale. This ensures that Cruise can not only quickly deploy its vehicles to new cities, but can do so while bearing the costs associated with each new launch.
“Each of these new markets has overhead costs,” he said. “We’ve orchestrated a glide path where on the one hand the technological improvements we’re making are going to open up new markets, like new capabilities – maybe really harsh weather or other things – and on the other hand you see how we’re increasing the production capacity to push vehicles into those markets.” .”
Cruise’s current fleet consists of Chevy Bolt electric vehicles equipped with sensors such as cameras, radar and lidar. The company is testing its next-generation vehicle, the Cruise Origin, at a proving ground in Michigan and plans to ramp up production next year.
“The Origin is now a real vehicle and we are currently testing it on closed tracks,” said Vogt. “He actually drives autonomously here.”
Vogt predicted that Cruise would generate as much as $1 billion in annual sales by 2025 — a bold statement given the slow pace of AV development.