Cruise gets green light for commercial robotaxi service in San Francisco

Cruise gets green light for commercial robotaxi service in San Francisco


Kyle Vogt, co-founder, president and chief technology officer for Cruise Automation Inc., speaks as he stands next to the Cruise Origin electric driverless shuttle during a reveal event in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Autonomous vehicle venture Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors, just scored the final permit it needed to offer its robotaxi service to paying riders in San Francisco, the company announced on Thursday.

Cruise boasted in a blog post that the authorization is “the first-ever Driverless Deployment Permit granted by the California Public Utilities Commission, ” and makes the company that first to operate a “a commercial, driverless ridehail service in a major US city.”

The company’s cars are fully electric and battery-powered, which is also a potential win for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases that cause climate change. The company told CPUC in an Apr. 2021 letter that it aims to make California roads safer and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Earlier, the California Department of Motor Vehicles approved autonomous vehicle deployment permits for both Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo.

Cruise was already offering nighttime rides to the public in San Francisco in its driverless cars, although it had not yet required passengers to pay a fare.

Police previously pulled a Cruise driverless vehicle over in San Franciso, and a video of the incident went viral. The California DMV told CNBC that, despite that incident , as of late April the department had yet to issue a traffic ticket to any driverless vehicle operator.

Rodney Brooks, professor emeritus in robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, rode in Cruise driverless taxis recently and wrote favorably of the experience on his blog.

He said, in that post, “Cruise has put together an MVP, a ‘Minimal Viable Product,’ the lynchpin of successful tech.” He also specified that he does not believe mass adoption of driverless cars is near. He wrote, “We have a ways to go yet, and mass adoption might not be in the form of one-for-one replacement of human driving that has driven this dream for the last decade or more.”

Competitors of Cruise are also testing driverless vehicles in San Francisco.

Alphabet’s Waymo has offered free driverless rides to employees or members of a testing program in San Francisco. It has also completed “tens of thousands” of rides without a driver behind the wheel in Arizona.

Another driverless startup, focused on transporting goods instead of passengers, Nuro, has a deployment permit to operate driverless cars in San Francisco, too.

While Tesla CEO Elon Musk often touts the company’s ambitions to deliver cars that are “robotaxi-ready,” Tesla vehicles at a maximum feature its Full Self Driving Beta program, an experimental driver assistance system, which requires drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and remain attentive to the road at all times.



Source

Rocket maker Firefly Aerospace files to go public under ticker FLY
Technology

Rocket maker Firefly Aerospace files to go public under ticker FLY

Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim sits for an interview at the Firefly Aerospace mission operations center in Leander, Texas, on July 9, 2025. Sergio Flores | Reuters Rocket maker Firefly Aerospace filed for an initial public offering on Friday, with plans to trade under the ticker symbol “FLY” on the Nasdaq. Firefly’s planned offering comes […]

Read More
Robinhood is up 160% this year, but several obstacles are ahead
Technology

Robinhood is up 160% this year, but several obstacles are ahead

Robinhood stock hit an all-time high Friday as the financial services platform continued to rip higher this year, along with bitcoin and other crypto stocks. Robinhood, up more than 160% in 2025, hit an intraday high above $101 before pulling back and closing slightly lower. The reversal came after a Bloomberg report that JPMorgan plans […]

Read More
Bill Gates says Trump’s cuts to USAID are devastating: ‘It’s not too late to reverse them’
Technology

Bill Gates says Trump’s cuts to USAID are devastating: ‘It’s not too late to reverse them’

Bill Gates speaks with Reuters during an interview in New York City, U.S., May 8, 2025. Mike Segar | Reuters Bill Gates, the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder, on Friday said it’s not too late to reinstate international aid funding that President Donald Trump cut off. The Trump administration placed staff members at the U.S. Agency […]

Read More