, Cruise, an autonomous vehicle company backed by General Motors, will be launching a small fleet of vehicles across the city in order to learn from Seattle's hilly environment and rainy weather conditions. Mohamed "Mo" ElshenawyThe company will be collecting data to assess the readiness of its AV system, which according to GeekWire, includes sensors, infrastructure, compute and network, hardware and software interface and applications.
Cruise has earned a permit to test their cars from the Seattle Department of Transportation's Autonomous Vehicle Testing Permit program, which requires a human driver to monitor and be ready to take control if need be.Other self-driving vehicle companies are currently testing in Seattle, like NVIDIA and Amazon's Zoox.
The Seattle City Council and SDOT launched their permitting program on Nov. 14, 2022, in response to safety concerns raised by the public after Amazon's driverless car company announced plans to test its product in the city.