HOUSTON – Driverless taxis are heading back to Houston highways - but with some stipulations.
The autonomous taxis are making their way around town after being put on hold back in October 2023.
Cruise, the self-driving car company, launched their testing program for the second time on Tuesday.
This time around, the cars will have drivers manually operating the vehicle. However, in a few weeks the company plans to move to supervised self-driving, which is when a driver is in the car but only intervening if necessary.
Eventually, the cars will drive themselves following the testing program.
“I don’t really trust that,” said Deyna Garcia.
You wouldn’t be alone in that idea.
In October 2023, a Cruise taxi in California hit a woman and dragged her for 20-feet during an accident.
“I think if they took the necessary precautions and went back in their testing and added some additional safeguards to ensure that didn’t happen,” said Dio Jamerson in support of the self-driving cars.
“It’s a computer driving itself,” countered Alexis Rubio. “Something wrong at any point can happen.”
SEE ALSO: Would you trust self-driving cars on Houston roads?
Houston, we missed you! Today we’re resuming driving in Houston where we’ll build on the knowledge collected last year. We’ll start with human driven vehicles and move to supervised autonomous driving with a safety driver behind the wheel in the coming weeks, guided by safety. pic.twitter.com/jh9e7edFoK
— cruise (@Cruise) June 11, 2024
Cruise, which is owned by General Motors, says they redesigned their approach to safety and even went as far as to bring on new leaders.
“Cruise’s AV stack is based on AI technology that learns from information gathered through our driving experience and retrains and evolves our models continuously,” a spokesperson told KPRC2. “The fleet learns from every intersection, construction zone, and road sign it encounters, and applies that knowledge to other environments and scenarios – much the same as a human driver learns, but with far more data and the ability to impart that continuous learning across the entire fleet. Because no two cities are the same, we plan to conduct this manual and supervised driving in multiple cities, including Houston, Dallas and Phoenix.”
If you’re looking to catch a ride in a self-driving taxi, it might be a while. There’s a waitlist to even sign up for Cruise.
