Cruise, Waymo driving in opposite directions a year after watershed vote

Cruise and Waymo have navigated unpredictable and, at times, tragic roads as windy as the San Francisco streets the companies have made their sandbox.

Alphabet-backed Waymo’s white sedans topped with revolving cameras have become staples on The City’s roads. Meanwhile, General Motors-owned Cruise has all but vanished from The City, and it’s unclear when — if ever — it will return.

The two companies were on relatively equal footing on Aug. 10, 2023 when the California Public Utilities Commission permitted them to expand ride-hailing services and fleet sizes without restrictions.

Since then, the companies have driven vastly different routes — as illustrated by how each responded to inquiries about the firms’ views of their standing in The City.

“This past year we’ve been incrementally and deliberately scaling our San Francisco service to meet the strong demand from locals and visitors alike,” Waymo director of product management Chris Ludwick said in an emailed statement.

“We remain focused on scaling Waymo One into an everyday service that riders trust and love, and look forward to bringing the benefits of full autonomy to even more people in the Bay Area,” he said.

But a Cruise spokesperson declined to comment, only directing us to the company’s June update when it announced it was resuming manual driving in Phoenix, Houston and Dallas.

The company’s vehicles have not been commercially deployed nationwide since one of its robotaxis severely injured a San Francisco pedestrian in an October crash 53 days after the CPUC’s vote.

The Examiner asked multiple autonomous-vehicle experts to evaluate the yearlong aftermath of the CPUC’s decision, which remains a watershed moment for the fledgling industry.

“It was eventful and very much a mixed bag with growing pains,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a law and autonomous vehicle expert at the University of South Carolina.

Still, he said, “I think I see a foundation for the future.”

Cruise’s bumpy road

Not long after expanding service, two Cruise driverless cars — one of which contained a passenger — collided with other vehicles in The City. The California Department of Motor Vehicles subsequently ordered Cruise to halve its fleet.

But everything changed for the company — and the industry — following the Oct. 2 crash.

A human driver struck a pedestrian jaywalking across at the intersection of Market and 5th streets with their car that night, knocking her face first into the ground. A Cruise car then drove over the woman and dragged her roughly 20 feet. The woman, who was hospitalized for months, reportedly received as much as a $12 million in a settlement .

So began Cruise’s swift downfall in San Francisco. The DMV revoked its license to operate in the state, the company pulled all of its cars from roads across the country ahead of state and federal investigations, and Cruise overhauled practically its entire C-suite .

The CPUC in June ordered Cruise to pay $112,500 to settle a state inquiry , citing a Cruise-commissioned report which found that the company misled investigators in the crash’s aftermath.

University of San Francisco professor of sustainable transportation Henriette Cornet said the ordeal reverberated throughout the industry.

“I’m sure all the AV providers looked at it very closely to see what they went through and what were the questions that were asked and the data that needed to be shared,” Cornet said. “I think everybody in the field has learned a lot about the importance of reporting, that the processes were not clear or standardized enough.”

Smith agreed that the accident was a valuable anomaly, posting that Cruise’s sloppy response played a larger role in diverting the company off course than the accident itself.

“[They] could have really changed the arc of this story” by being more forthcoming, he said.

Last firm standing

In recent months, Cruise has focused on rehabbing its image and returning to roads outside of San Francisco. Smith said it’s notable the company has restarted operations in Texas and Arizona, states with less regulatory transportation laws than California.

In fact, the company hasn’t mentioned San Francisco much when discussing its plans. A company spokesperson declined to comment when asked by The Examiner if Cruise has a timeline for returning to The City.

Smith said he thinks that would be a mistake.

“You’re avoiding those hard conversations from the experienced and rightly skeptical audiences that you should be in front of,” he said, calling it the “easy way out.”

As Cruise’s presence has evaporated, Waymo has held onto its permits and emerged as The City’s dominant robotaxi presence.

At the time of the CPUC vote, Waymo operated 250 robotaxis in The City. Now, it has 300.

Waymo eliminated the waitlist for its services in June, making the ride-request process comparable to Uber or Lyft. Earlier this month, it expanded its service into the peninsula and began testing AVs on Bay Area freeways.

Last week, Waymo announced that its robotaxis had surpassed 100,000 weekly paid rides nationwide, touting the accomplishment as “the first time any fully autonomous ride-hailing service has ever reached this kind of mainstream use.”

However, the company has hit speed bumps. In May, federal regulators opened an investigation into Waymo after receiving 22 reports of vehicles crashing or violating traffic laws.

Waymo robotaxis sitting in a SoMa parking lot abruptly honked their horns in the middle of the night, waking neighbors in adjacent apartments and leading to headlines across San Francisco.

Smith said Waymo’s pace of expansion hasn’t been as dramatic since it might not be able to turn a profit while competing against human-driven ride-hailing companies.

But he added the entire AV industry continues to owe San Francisco a major debt of gratitude for showing “what the real world is like” while testing its technology there.

At the same time, he warned that Waymo might represent the last hope for AVs after Cruise’s gaffes.

“If a Cruise-like incident were to happen to Waymo, it would threaten the whole industry,” Smith said. “That would be devastating in a lot of ways.”

Asked whether the events of the last year in The City have left the industry in a better place, Cornet, the USF professor, said “it depends on how you look at it.”

“I would say it’s not positive, but we’re learning,” Cornet said. “It’s a pathway we have to go through.”