Self-driving cars to be tested in New York City

DETROIT — Autonomous vehicles are already navigating the hills of Pittsburgh and the pitched avenues of San Francisco. They may soon be tested by the chaos of Manhattan, where pedestrians, taxis, buses and bikes embark daily on an eternal quest to avoid impact.

Cruise Automation, a self-driving software company owned by General Motors Co., aims to begin testing in New York City early next year. GM and Cruise are applying to operate in New York under a new pilot program announced Tuesday by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

If approved, the tests will mark the first time a fully self-driving vehicle will be allowed to operate in New York state, Cuomo said.

The test vehicles will be electric Chevrolet Bolt cars equipped with cameras, radar, sensors and Cruise’s software. GM and Cruise currently have a registered fleet of 100 autonomous Bolts that are already operating in San Francisco, Phoenix and the Detroit area.

In New York, a small fleet of cars will operate in a 5-square-mile area of lower Manhattan. They will always have an engineer behind the wheel and an observer in the front passenger seat. Cruise and GM didn’t immediately say how many vehicles will be operating in New York.

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt says the densely populated city will give the company more unusual situations to test software and accelerate the development of the technology.

In a blog post earlier this month, Vogt said every minute of testing in a complicated urban environment like San Francisco is the equivalent of an hour of testing in suburbs. For example, he said, test cars in San Francisco encountered 270 emergency vehicles every 1,000 miles; in the Phoenix suburbs, they encountered only six.

“Testing in the hardest places first means we’ll get to scale faster than starting with the easier ones,” Vogt wrote.