Cruise robots make a cautious return to Houston

Robotaxi specialist Cruise is relaunching tests of its autonomous vehicles on the streets of Houston, TechCrunch reported Tuesday.

Cruise’s main backer, General Motors, announced the same day that it would invest an additional $850 million in the robotaxi project.

The developments come as Cruise cautiously returns to testing its self-driving cars on public roads after a series of troubling incidents last year. The worst of these involved a pedestrian who was dragged across the street by a driverless cruiser in San Francisco in October after being thrown into its path following a collision with a vehicle driven by a human.

The crash, which the woman survived, prompted California to suspend Cruise’s operating license in the state, a move that led Cruise to suspend testing nationwide soon after.

Since then, Cruise has returned very small fleets to Phoenix and Dallas. In a sign of Cruise’s very cautious approach, the Houston fleet will only include three vehicles and, although they are equipped with autonomous systems, those equipment will not be operational at this time, Axios reported. This suggests that Cruise simply wants to gauge how human drivers react on the same roads and help them get used to seeing Cruise cars on the streets of Houston again.

Once ready, Cruise will begin “supervised autonomous driving” in which the autonomous systems will operate but with a human behind the wheel ready to intervene if necessary.

The company began operating its self-driving cars in Houston last fall. But his decision to stop testing nationwide resulted in testing in the city stopping after just a few weeks.

Cruise was founded in 2013 and has since raised more than $15 billion in funding, with GM providing more than half of that figure since acquiring the company in 2016.

During the crisis at the end of last year, there were questions about whether Cruise would continue its work in the autonomous vehicle sector. But with GM’s backing, he insisted he would continue, albeit with a new approach described by a Cruise spokesperson as “slow and steady.”

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