After conquering the south and west, Cruise is heading to Music City.
In a social media post, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt announced Nashville, Tennessee will be their next “robotaxi-enabled city.” While a launch is a “few months” away, the executive said more cities are on the horizon.
Cruise didn’t say why they picked Nashville, but it’s a popular tourist destination that relies heavily on taxis and ride-hailing services for transporting visitors to and from the city’s various bars and music venues. This seemingly makes Nashville the ideal location for Cruise to expand into.
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While a number of questions remain, Vogt said “Our theory was simple: if we can make autonomous vehicles work in a city like San Francisco – with its fog, hills, and traffic – they’ll work just about anywhere.” He added that when the company expanded to Austin and Phoenix last year, it “took some work to adapt to these new cities, but most of the systems worked well.”
The executive then noted they searched for “areas where our AV system didn’t generalize well” and fixed it by either redesigning “parts of a system” or “retraining our ML models using data from the new city.” The company also deleted the “‘if city X, then do Y’ logic that would make it cumbersome to scale.”
Thanks to these and other changes, Vogt said Cruise’s autonomous driving technology has improved significantly and is “fairly robust to things it has never seen before.” He added rollouts in Dallas and Houston have gone more smoothly, while also requiring “much less work” than in previous cities.
This is an important development as it means Cruise can speed up deployments to additional cities. The executive added the company has now found its groove as they “scout a city, augment our datasets, retrain, validate, and go.” Vogt went on to say the process is “mostly automated now” and “If our engineers wrote absolutely no new code for a month, our systems would still automatically retrain our ML models using the latest data and the AVs would get slightly better.”
