Cruise, an autonomous vehicle company owned by General Motors (NYSE: GM), will soon deploy self-driving cars on Phoenix streets.
Kyle Vogt, the CEO of Cruise, tweeted on Monday that the company would bring its autonomous taxis to Phoenix and Austin, Texas “later this year.” At a Sept. 12event he said it could happen within 90 days, according to the Associated Press.
Cruise vehicles will have other autonomous traffic to contend with in the form of Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOGL), that has been operating driverless rides in the Valley since 2018.
Cruise started R&D operations in Arizona back in 2017 and the company began testing driverless deliveries with Walmart in Scottsdale in 2020, completing more than 10,000 deliveries just in the past few months.
Millions of miles of testing
Between its testing in both Scottsdale and San Francisco, the company’s vehicles have traveled about 2 million miles, Cruise’s government affairs manager Carter Stern said in testimony to the Arizona state Senate earlier this year.
The company would not share a specific Valley headcount, but in February Cruise's Stern said the company employed about 100 people locally, including computer programmers and the team that monitors the company’s global fleet.
“It's an amazing place for people,” he said in February testimony to the state legislature. “When we recruit out of San Francisco and New York and some of these tech hubs and tell people they can move to Arizona, it gets them to ‘Yes’ very quickly. This is a really great place for people to live and we've been happy to make it one of our homes.”
Cruise started offering driverless rides in San Francisco in June after earning the first-ever Driverless Deployment Permit from the California Public Utilities Commission.
Cruise was founded in 2013 and GM bought a majority stake in 2016. GM has poured more than $3 billion into its Cruise investment after buying out SoftBank’s equity earlier this year.
The company has more than 300 vehicles between San Francisco and the Valley and more than 2,400 employees worldwide.
