New Company to Start Testing Driverless Cars in San Francisco

 

Cruise LLC became the fifth company to receive a driverless vehicle testing permit for the city of San Francisco today. This enables the company to test driverless their vehicles on public city streets. Although Cruise had been authorized by the California DMV to test autonomous vehicles in the city since 2015, those tests required that safety test drivers were present within the vehicles. Currently, there are sixty companies in total that have an active permit to test autonomous vehicles in California with a safety driver on board.

This new permit authorizes the company to launch five autonomous vehicles that do not have a driver behind the wheel at all. This test will be limited to specified streets within San Francisco and only on roads with posted speed limits of 30 miles per hour or less. Test drives will occur at all times - day and night - but test drives will not be allowed during inclement (rain or heavy fog) weather.

In order to qualify for this higher level of autonomous vehicle testing permit, companies are required to meet several safety, insurance and vehicle registration requirements:

• They must show certified evidence of holding insurance or a bond equal to $5 million.
• Their vehicles must be demonstrated as capable of operating without a driver, meet federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards or have an exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and be a SAE Level 4 or 5 vehicle.
• They must have tested the vehicles involved under controlled conditions that closely simulate the planned area of operation.

• They must notify all local governments involved of the planned testing area.
• Deliver a Law Enforcement Interaction Plan so that members of local law enforcement and other first responders understand how to interact with the autonomous test vehicles if necessary.
• They must agree to monitor the status of test vehicles on a continuous basis.
• Training remote operators on the technology being tested.

In addition, all driverless testing permit holders must report any collisions involving their driverless test vehicles to the DMV within 10 days of occurrence and submit an annual report of any disengagements.

Additional information is available on the DMV’s autonomous vehicle webpage.