They’re baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack…
Houston, we missed you! Today we’re resuming driving in Houston where we’ll build on the knowledge collected last year. We’ll start with human driven vehicles and move to supervised autonomous driving with a safety driver behind the wheel in the coming weeks, guided by safety.
— cruise (@Cruise) 10:55 AM – 11 June 2024
General Motors’ Cruise began test-driving their autonomous vehicles in Houston again months after the faulty cars were pulled off the streets pending a federal investigation, a spokesperson said on Tuesday.
The company will begin its relaunch into Houston with drivers behind the wheels of the autonomous vehicles charged with creating map data and gathering road information. The company’s fleet began test driving again in Phoenix in April after a short hiatus and a staff shakeup.
The vehicles are still the subject of a federal investigation launched by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a branch of the United States Department of Transportation last year after several reports of the driverless cars injuring pedestrians.
[…]
In an open letter posted to Cruise’s website, the company said it has “thoroughly examined” standards, processes and systems guided by expert external reviews since reports of the vehicles malfunctioning in October last year.
The company’s Houston fleet will start as human-driven vehicles before moving to a supervised autonomous driving phase in the coming weeks.
See here, here, and here for some background. Cruise announced its return to the streets of Phoenix in April, and they relaunched in Dallas last week, so this was going to happen sooner or later. I still think the hype greatly outweighs the value, but we’ll see how they do this time around. Anyone out there excited to give this a try? TechCrunch and the Houston Landing, which quotes a Cruise spokesperson as saying “there will be three driver-operated vehicles in Bellaire, West University Place, and The Villages with hopes of later expanding to the Fifth Ward area”, though there is not yet a timeline for resuming driverless service, has more.