Cruise’s move makes it the first autonomous tech company to offer robotic rides in California, where Alphabet’s Waymo is also preparing to launch a competing service. Waymo already offers fully autonomous rides in suburban Phoenix, though traffic conditions there are less dense and complex than in crowded San Francisco.
Separately, the company said that SoftBank completed the investment of an additional $1.35 billion into it, part of an earlier plan. That boosts its total funding to $10 billion, coming from GM, Honda, Walmart and Microsoft, in addition to SoftBank. The start of Cruise’s service marks a big step for the company as it works to make driverless technology widely available. Billions of investment dollars have flowed into developers of the technology over the past five years, particularly to Waymo, Ford- and Volkswagen-backed Argo AI, Amazon’s Zoox and delivery-bot developer Nuro, as well as Cruise. Yet the timeline for broad commercialization of autonomous tech remains murky.
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