- Self-driving startup Cruise revealed its Origin vehicle in San Francisco this week.
- The company has been optimizing its service by testing in the complicated Bay Area urban environment.
- But cofounder and CTO Kyle Vogt said that the company has technology that could allow for highway operation.
- Click here for more BI Prime stories.
In the self-driving world, there are really two big challenges that directly influence companies' business plans.
The conventional wisdom is that startups have to choose between operating in dense, congested cities; or on open highways and higher speeds, but fewer unpredictable obstacles.
Business-wise, you can see how an urban-first plan suits a ride-hailing model: Metropolitan areas are where the customers are, and where you can keep an autonomous vehicle running 24/7 to max out the investment in the hardware.
The highway belongs to the consumer side - think of advanced cruise-control systems such as Tesla Autopilot and Cadillac Super Cruise - and potentially to large tractor-trailer rigs.
Nice and neat, right? Except that there are problematic overlaps. And Cruise, the San Francisco-based startup that General Motors bought for about $1 billion all-in in 2016, wants to address them.
Can't leave highways off the table
At the reveal of the company's new Origin self-driving platform this week, I asked cofounder and CTO Kyle Vogt about Cruise's 2017 acquisition of a maker of small laser-radar units, Strobe, in 2017. I'd thought that reducing the size of lidar units mainly helped Cruise better integrate them into vehicle design, but Vogt quickly explained that Cruiser wanted the tech for "highway applications."
It was one of those tiny comments that suggests plenty. Cruise has been racking up test miles in San Francisco, intentionally working to perfect its technology in what Vogt has characterized as an entropic, random environment. The goal is to be able to offer a robot taxi service that can serve riders in the Bay Area.
But of course the Bay Area isn't all surface streets. It has four commercial airports, and reaching them via highways is routine.
A complete self-driving service
There are other reasons to use highways, even in dense urban regions. California in particular was developed with the idea that highways aren't just connectors of cities, but ways to bypass the congestion of surface roadways. Not being able to use them is a disadvantage. For self-driving startups, that would limit their service offerings. And it probably isn't lost on anyone in the space that although airport runs, for example, are time-consuming, they're also lucrative.
Cruise's business model relies on three pillars: Integrating technology and manufacturing, through GM and Honda (the latter an equity investor); cracking the urban space (because that's where the customers are); and being truly self-driving (as in no human operators involved).
With San Francisco as the official launch city, it would probably be acceptable to avoid highways. But it doesn't look like Cruise is interested in dodging that opportunity.