Self-driving Cruise cars are back in service in two Texas cities after operations were suspended there for several months

If you’ve been driving the streets of Texas for the past few months without seeing Cruise self-driving cars everywhere, get ready: Cruise is officially resuming testing in Texas cities like Dallas and Houston, months after ceasing operations in the Lone Star State in October 2023.

At the time, Cruise said the decision to halt its services in Texas was not due to new traffic accidents, although emergency responders and Austin City Council members had raised concerns about autonomous vehicles like Cruise’s fleet of robotaxis. Eight months later, Cruise appears ready to hit the road and resume testing in Texas.

In an emailed statement to LoneStarLive.com about the company’s decision to resume operations in Dallas, Craig Glidden, Cruise’s co-president and chief administrative officer, said, “Cruise believes autonomous vehicles will save lives and significantly reduce the number and severity of crashes on America’s roadways each year. As we take this next important step toward our autonomous driving mission, we are excited to be back on the streets of the City of Dallas and are grateful for the opportunity to work with the City to achieve safer transportation for all.”

So what does it mean that Cruise has resumed testing in Dallas and Houston?

According to the company, this includes testing Cruise’s fleet of autonomous vehicles with the help of humans who will drive the cars. The testing will then transition to supervised autonomous driving, which requires a safety driver to be behind the wheel and ready to take over driving if needed. By testing in different markets, such as Houston and Dallas, Cruise can make informed decisions about when and where to resume fully driverless operations.

Cruise first announced in April that it had resumed testing of its fleet of autonomous vehicles with manual drivers in Phoenix. Dallas was the next city to resume testing with manual drivers. Notably absent from the list of cities where Cruise is resuming testing is Austin.

But given the way Austin City Council members and Mayor Paige Ellis talked about the risks of autonomous vehicles at a Mobility Committee meeting in October 2023, this is not entirely surprising.

Austin, Texas and other cities fight back against autonomous vehicles

At the Austin City Council’s Mobility Committee hearing, held shortly after Cruise’s first shutdown in October 2023, Austin Mayor Ellis stressed, “Our public streets should not be a testing ground. We should not be treated like guinea pigs.”

Although there have been no injuries related to self-driving cars in Austin so far, Ellis noted that the autonomous vehicles have “caused a fair amount of frustration.” He added that people on social media have seen videos of Cruise cars and other self-driving vehicles malfunctioning and causing traffic problems.

“It’s important that autonomous vehicle manufacturers recognize that these self-driving cars can be dangerous,” Ellis said during the meeting. But Austin isn’t the only place that has experienced less than ideal encounters with autonomous cars and robotaxis.

Waymo, another autonomous ride-hailing service that has been testing its fleet of vehicles in various cities across the U.S., including Austin, recently issued a voluntary software recall after one of its self-driving vehicles crashed into a telephone pole in Phoenix. The Verge reports that Waymo is filing the recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and will roll out a software update to its entire fleet of self-driving vehicles.

The latest software recall for Waymo comes about four months after the company recalled 444 of its self-driving cars following two minor collisions in Phoenix in December 2023. The collisions involved two different Waymo self-driving cars, both of which collided on separate occasions with a pickup truck being towed by a tow vehicle that was “not traveling properly in a straight line,” according to Reuters.

Days after the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended operations of Cruise cars across the state in October 2023, citing a “disproportionate risk to public safety” after a Cruise car in San Francisco dragged a woman nearly 20 feet who had just been hit by another driver, the company decided of its own volition to cease operations in Texas.

In an October 2023 statement, Cruise said, “The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to restore public trust. That includes taking a critical look inward and at how we operate at Cruise, even if that means doing things that are uncomfortable or difficult.”

The woman involved in the San Francisco incident reportedly received a hefty compensation of between $8 million and $12 million from Cruise.

Organizational changes at Cruise

Since temporarily suspending services, Cruise has made numerous internal changes, including appointing Steve Kenner as the company’s new chief strategy officer and hiring Glidden from General Motors as Cruise’s co-president and chief administrative officer.

Cruise published an open letter on the company’s website in March, acknowledging its shortcomings and announcing its plans to rebuild autonomous operations by strengthening safety controls, increasing transparency and refocusing on partnerships with local leaders and residents of the communities it seeks to serve.

This conversion process also includes testing Cruise vehicles with manual driver controls to “create high-quality semantic maps and collect road information so that future deployments meet increased safety and performance goals.”