GM’s Robocar Service Drives Employees Around SF for Free
GM’s Robocar Service Drives Employees Around SF for Free
If there’s anything to be said for working at a Silicon Valley tech company, it’s the perks. Walls of snacks. Nap pods. Fridges plunged with Crimson Bull. And for select employees at Cruise, General Motors’ autonomous driving clothing in San Francisco, rails anywhere in the city, for free, in a self-driving car.
Cruise Anywhere, which launched Tuesday, works just like Uber or Lyft: Open the app, type in your location and destination, and wait for your car. It’s available to ten percent of Cruise’s two hundred fifty employees, inbetween seven am and eleven pm, and uses the company’s fleet of forty six 1 Chevrolet Bolt EVs. (There will still be a safety driver sitting up front, no doubt thrilled their colleagues are headed to glad hour while they work the late shift.)
The program’s launch marks a turning point for Cruise, which GM bought in two thousand fifteen for $600 million, as it switches from developing autonomous technology to building a self-driving taxi service. And of course, it’s more than a fringe benefit for hardworking engineers. It marks a fresh chapter in the development of technology Cruise has spent three years on. Real-world testing will expose how the vehicles treats the road, and the people it carries.
“The Exceptionally significant thing you build up is the perspective of an actual end user,” says Karl Iagnemma, CEO of Nutonomy, a rival self-driving company that has run a similar pilot in Singapore. This is the bit where you see if people feel comfy with how the car drives, how your dispatch system works, whether your user interface makes sense—all the things that will matter to paying customers. That's why Google spinoff Waymo is running a pilot for a select audience in Arizona, and Uber does the same in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Tempe, Arizona. “There’s truly no substitute for having civilians in the car,” Iagnemma says.
Of course, Cruise employees aren’t civilians, or a representative sample of a potential customer base. But they are far more likely to keep quiet about hiccups with the tech, and will provide valuable feedback without exposing Cruise to a PR maelstrom if something goes awry.
It remains to be seen how long this program will run, or when Cruise might expand it to the general public, either in California or a state with less limitary regulations. And it’s not clear how GM’s deal with Lyft to work together on a self-driving car network fits in with Cruise’s decision to build its own app for connecting riders with cars.
But for now, we can say GM’s bid to stay relevant in the age of autonomy just got a boost.
1 Story updated at 14:15 ET on Thursday, August ten to include an updated number of cars running in the Cruise pilot program.
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