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Houstonians can now take self-driving cars to some Inner Loop destinations with GM’s Cruise taxis.
After months of testing in Houston, Cruise autonomous vehicles became available Thursday to the public for rides from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. in downtown, Midtown, East Downtown, Montrose, Hyde Park and River Oaks. Anyone can sign up to ride on its website.
For a limited time, all trips will be $5. In the future, customers will be charged a base fare plus a per-mile, per-minute basis.
Testing of the autonomous vehicles began in May, with a Cruise employee monitoring the cars. And since August, Cruise employees have been the first to use the driverless cars. Cruise vehicles use a variety of sensors and cameras that provide a 360-degree view of everything around the car, and artificial intelligence makes real-time predictions based on this data.
The technology originated in San Francisco and has since expanded to Austin, Phoenix and now Houston. According to the company, it has driven 5 million driverless miles, including 1 million in Texas. The company, backed by GM, Honda, Microsoft, T. Rowe Price and Walmart, also does driverless deliveries for Walmart in Phoenix.
While driverless vehicles may be exciting to some, they’re concerning to others. Last month, a traffic jam was caused by a group of autonomous Cruise cars on a busy Austin road.
In May, Peter Stone, a University of Texas at Austin professor researching how to make autonomous cars safer, noted that the positive to these cars is that when one makes a mistake, you can, in principle, fix that mistake for the entire fleet.
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