GM's Cruise to Offer Driverless Taxi Service in Two U.S. Cities

On Monday, Kyle Vogt, chief executive of Cruise, a self-driving technology company owned by General Motors, said the company plans to expand its self-driving cab service to Phoenix, Arizona, and Austin, Texas, within 90 days.

Cruise, which is currently losing money, aims to achieve $1 billion in revenue by 2025, half of GM's annual investment, Vogt said at a Goldman Sachs conference.

In June, Cruise began offering nightly fare-based self-driving cab service in San Francisco, using a Chevrolet Bolt electric car. Cruise operates up to 70 driverless cars in San Francisco and plans to double or triple the number by the end of the year, Vogt said.

Vogt said it will initially put only a small number of self-driving cars in Austin and Phoenix to "bring in some revenue" and plans to scale up operations next year.

Cruise has already received full permission to use self-driving cars in Phoenix for its online taxi and delivery services, and has tested a driverless delivery service with one of its investors, Walmart.

Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car company, is already operating a driverless cab service in suburban Phoenix. In San Francisco, Waymo also offers self-driving cab service for a limited number of users, but with a safety driver on board.

Some investors are abandoning investments in risky technologies and reassessing large-scale deployments of self-driving cars on public roads.

Vogt said the self-driving car industry has shifted from "extreme optimism" to "extreme pessimism," but that's about to change. "I think people are going to be surprised at how quickly these kinds of services become available when they first get in a self-driving car."

In June, Cruise's self-driving car was involved in an accident in San Francisco that injured two people. Subsequently, Cruise recalled 80 self-driving cars and performed a software upgrade. Vogt acknowledged that "we need to continue to work through some of the difficulties," but that self-driving technology is "no longer a major bottleneck.