USA TODAY International Edition
GM and Honda bet on Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt
San Francisco’s hills test self-driving technology
SAN FRANCISCO — Kyle Vogt was 14 when he saw the light, sitting behind the wheel of his father’s car as it crossed the arrow-straight highways of the American Southwest. ❚ “I had my learner’s permit, and as I was driving from our home in Kansas to Las Vegas for a remote-controlled battle-bot competition and I thought, ‘Surely this can be done by robots, just read the lane markers and keep the wheel steady,’” Vogt says with a laugh. “So that was the beginning.” ❚ Nearly two decades later, Vogt, 32, has made that epiphany his mission in life.
As founder and CEO of Cruise, a self-driving automotive tech company that General Motors bought for $1 billion in 2016, Vogt has sped to the front of the autonomous car pack thanks most recently to a big partnership deal with Honda.
There are dozens of car companies and tech startups tackling the selfdriving car space, given that ride-hailing fleets with no drivers promise untold riches assuming tech costs and car ownership both decline.
But Cruise arguably has only one main competitor: Alphabet-owned Waymo, which has been at this for a decade, and for a year now has been busily testing hundreds of self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans in Phoenix.
Waymo is aiming to make its betatesting program public this year.
Cruise is aiming to start picking up passengers here in its Chevy Boltbased self-driving cars sometime in 2019. Vogt is vague on whether the program will be limited to a select group of riders at first, in an echo of Waymo’s current beta program.
But he wishes to make one thing clear: Cruise’s testing across this hilly, traffic-snarled city will ultimately yield more capable robot cars.
That’s because since 2016, Cruise has deployed a small group of cars (at first 50, now 20) on what he describes as the comparatively easy-to-navigate streets of Phoenix.
“Just look at construction zones, for one,” Vogt says during an interview with USA TODAY inside a spartan conference room at Cruise, whose headquarters are just south of downtown San Francisco.
“Those (zones) pop up 30 to 40 times more often for our cars in San Francisco than they did when we were testing our own cars in Phoenix,” he says. “That means as an engineer working in Phoenix, you can just write that off as a problem. But we’re dealing with that, with emergency services vehicles, with bicyclists. It’s a lot more challenging.”
Vogt also likes to highlight how the software and hardware in Cruise vehicles is fully integrated thanks to Cruise being wholly owned by GM, a comparison perhaps to Waymo’s vehicle partnerships with Fiat Chrysler and Jaguar Land Rover.
Most mobility experts say that the race toward autonomy is not a winner-take-all proposition. In the end, a few big companies will be making the self-driving cars that shuttle us around in the decades to come.
But in the short run, Vogt is indeed implying that the self-driving fleets that win over those early-adopters (polls show that half of respondents remain nervous about riding in autonomous cars) will be companies that have demonstrated an ability to handle extreme urban road conditions and, eventually, extreme weather.
Given that self-driving ride-hailing fleets remain largely a mobility vision of the future, the company that dominates this space will need brilliant minds and lots of money.
While Waymo’s funding appears unlimited, Cruise will have to keep an eye on its cash pile, says Bryan Reimer, a research scientist and self-driving expert with MIT AgeLab. “Cruise has GM’s resources, the recent ($2.25 billion) investment from (tech investors) SoftBank, and now the Honda deal ($2.75 billion over 12 years). We’ll see if it’s enough,” he says.