Reported by Lurah Lowery for Repairer Driven News
Beginning this week, Cruise autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be safety-tested on roads in Phoenix with drivers behind the wheel. Meanwhile, two Zoox AV-involved crashes are being investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
The company pulled all its vehicles off U.S. roadways last October after the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) suspended the Cruise operations, in part due to safety, but also because the state said Cruise “misrepresented” information related to the vehicles’ safety.
The suspension came shortly after an August collision between a Cruise vehicle and a firetruck in San Francisco and a pedestrian-involved incident.
For the past several weeks, Cruise says it has been mapping and collecting road information in Phoenix and will now validate its AV end-to-end behaviors against “rigorous safety and AV performance requirements.”
“Supervised autonomous driving is a critical validation phase prior to driverless deployment and builds on our extensive work in simulation, closed-course driving and more than 5 million driverless miles previously driven by our fleet to ensure safe performance on real-world roads and driving scenarios,” a Cruise news release states.
Read more here.