General Motor’s subsidiary Cruise is now offering the public free driverless taxi rides in San Francisco, the company announced Feb. 1.
Cruise has opened a sign-up page through an online waitlist on its website where anyone can try a fully autonomous ride, “and free, for now,” Kyle Vogt, Cruise’s interim CEO, CTO, and co-founder, said in a blog post. “We’re starting with a small number of users and will ramp up as we make more cars available, so sign up now to lock in an early spot.”
Until now, only GM employees could try Cruise’s self-driving taxi service. The most recent sign this moment was coming was in September, when Cruise and Google’s sibling company Waymo became the first companies to receive permits to charge passengers for autonomous taxi rides in California.
Founded in 2013, San Francisco-based Cruise was acquired by General Motors in 2016. Cruise is now authorized to use a fleet of light-duty autonomous vehicles for commercial services on surface streets within designated parts of San Francisco.
“It’s the first truly driverless ridehail service offered to the general public in a dense urban environment,” General Motors CEO Mary Barra said in a letter to shareholders. “This major milestone brings Cruise even closer to offering its first paid rides and generating $50 billion in annual revenue by the end of the decade.”
The vehicles are approved to operate on public roads in San Francisco between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. at a maximum speed limit of 30 miles per hour and can operate in light rain and light fog.
“There’s no better place for us to start than in San Francisco, a place where thinking big is encouraged regardless of how outrageous your ideas may seem,” Vogt said in the blog post.
In addition, Cruise noted Japanese venture capital firm SoftBank’s Vision Fund, which initially invested $900 million in Cruise in 2018, agreed to invest an additional $1.35 billion when Cruise started operating fully driverless cars. “I’m pleased to announce we’ve officially hit that milestone,” Vogt said in the blog post. “This additional capital will help us expand our world-class team and quickly scale this technology across San Francisco and into more communities.”
