Beginning in Phoenix, Cruise will once again drive its autonomous cars manually to compile road data and make maps, the firm announced on Tuesday. Prior to withdrawing its entire U.S. fleet last year in response to an incident in San Francisco that left a pedestrian caught beneath and dragged by a Cruise robotaxi, the GM subsidiary was already present in Phoenix.

Cruise has been revealing launches in new locations at an astonishing rate before that tragedy, including Dallas, Houston, and Miami. Critics charged that the business was reducing safety standards and growing too quickly.

Presently, it seems like Cruise is returning to its roots, making a dramatic change from the company's recent aggressive expansion plan. In 2022, Kyle Vogt, a former co-founder and CEO of Cruise who resigned from the company due to scandal in the previous year, informed investors that Cruise had "de-risked the technical approach" by bringing successful strategies from San Francisco to comparable ride-share markets.

In a post that appears to have been written in 2018, Cruise describes in a blog post that was published on Tuesday how, in order for the AV to comprehend its surroundings, it must first identify high-fidelity location data for road features and map information such as lane paint and speed limits.

The article continues by outlining Cruise's gradual return to completely autonomous operations under human supervision and with ongoing technological confirmation.

These actions are all necessary to establish and grow a self-driving vehicle company, so we have to question if Cruise is simply stating the obvious for the good of the public or if its new safety team is throwing out the old technology and starting anew.

A representative for Cruise declined to discuss the company's approach.

There have been prior instances of Cruise's technology causing issues, before to the October event. Throughout the second half of 2023, Cruise continued to grow by adding additional cities, but in places like Austin and San Francisco, its robotaxis would frequently break down, causing traffic, public transportation, and emergency services to be disrupted.

Aside from technological problems, Cruise's handling of the event late in the year really got it into trouble. Authorities said that the business had concealed details of the collision, only disclosing that a pedestrian was struck by a human-driven car before being run over by a Cruise robotaxi. The pedestrian was run over by a Cruise vehicle, but the details of what happened were withheld from the public until days later. This information was disclosed in an internal report prepared by the legal firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and published in January.

Due of the information being handled improperly, parent firm GM cut expenditures and increased its influence on Cruise.

As stated in the blog post on Tuesday, a significant portion of Cruise's future plan is updating and revamping incident response and crisis management procedures to guarantee future responses that are more effective and transparent. The business claims that in order to support trainings in every precinct it intends to operate in, it will also seek to enhance its interaction with first responders.

Cruise has not disclosed the location or date of its autonomous operations return. After the disaster, Cruise lost its license to operate out of San Francisco, where its primary operations had previously been located. In August 2023, Cruise started extending its region of paid service in the Phoenix area. Waymo, the primary rival of Cruise that is still operational in San Francisco and owned by Alphabet, has been offering a paid autonomous robot taxi service in the area since 2020. In the previous year, the company expanded its service area to include downtown Phoenix and introduced driverless trips to the airport.