The New York Times (NYT) report reveals that General Motors’ robotaxi company, Cruise, often relies on human help in San Francisco. According to the report, the company’s autonomous vehicles require human assistance every 2.5 to 5 miles.
Cruise’s driverless vehicles, which have been driving around the city since 2020, were stopped last week after the California DMV denied Cruise permits for testing and driving driverless vehicles had withdrawn. Two days later, Cruise halted its autonomous testing nationwide.
The NYT report sheds light on the fleet’s seemingly not entirely autonomous journey. Employees have cruise vehicles in San Francisco remotely assisted every 2.5 to 5 miles, according to the report’s sources.
In recent months, the company’s driverless vehicles have made a number of spectacular mistakes, including one incident, in which a car struck a pedestrian and continued driving while the person was crushed underneath. Cruise employs a large operations team, which deployed one and a half employees per vehicle in San Francisco on October 24th. This will be expensive for General Motors, Cruise’s parent company, as it lost around $1.9 billion on the autonomous car maker between January and September.
Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt has hinted at possible layoffs as the company still waits to resume driverless operations.
The fact that Cruise appears to rely on human assistance raises questions about Vogt’s previous claims that Cruise will ultimately be more cost-effective than Uber or Lyft. It remains to be seen how these latest delays will impact the company’s ambitious goal of putting one million driverless vehicles on the road by 2030.