Cruise robotaxis available to the public in Houston

Howdy, Houston 👋 Starting today we will be welcoming members of the public to our driverless service.

From Downtown to River Oaks, EaDo to Montrose, join our waitlist to experience the magic of driverless rides: https://t.co/0d4QmeyRiV pic.twitter.com/6WbkkbFgm1

— cruise (@Cruise) October 12, 2023

Cruise has opened its robotaxi service to the public in Houston. The company will operate seven days a week from 9 PM to 6 AM in an 11 square mile area that covers the Downtown, Midtown, East Downtown, Montrose, Hyde Park, and River Oaks neighborhoods.

Cruise began testing its robotaxis, with safety drivers behind the wheel, in May of this year in both Houston and Dallas. Houston marks the fourth city that Cruise has started public operations in, following San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin.

The company tests in four other cities, Charlotte, NC, Dallas, Miami, and Nashville. Cruise has been rapidly expanding its robotaxi operations in the last year. While it took the company 33 months to receive all the regulatory approval it needed to begin rides in San Francisco, according to Vogt, it took just three weeks for the company’s next deployment locations in Phoenix and Austin.

This rapid growth falls in line with the company’s deployment philosophy. It started its operations in San Francisco, a city with notoriously difficult traffic conditions. Between steep hills, heavy traffic, and fog, the robotaxis had plenty to get used to there.

Once they had tackled San Francisco, however, Cruise’s technology had a solid foundation of knowledge about how to drive, meaning the company simply had to adjust its system to new cities with different driving cultures to deploy in them.

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While Cruise has had much success in rolling out its robotaxi services, it hasn’t been without challenges. Earlier this year, the company issued a voluntary recall of 300 Cruise vehicles with the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). The recall was in response to a minor collision where a Cruise robotaxi hit the back of a San Francisco bus.

Cruise’s autonomous driving system is also currently being investigated by NHTSA. In a filing, NHSTA said it was interested in two different issues that had been reported to the administration that both resulted in the robotaxis becoming hazards for others on the road.

Recently, the company gave insight into how it’s improving its vehicle’s response to emergency vehicles and first responders. These measures include preemptive AV slowing during siren detection, improved emergency vehicle prediction behavior, intersection stop regions, emergency scene recognition, parked emergency vehicle bypassing, enhanced audio detection, multiple alert notifications, and firehouse and caution tape detection.