The Dallas Regional Chamber connected with member company Cruise to learn more about the autonomous vehicle company’s mission to connect people with the places, things, and experiences they care about, as well as the company’s upcoming expansion into the Dallas market.
How does Cruise help other businesses become more effective?
Cruise is singularly focused on our mission to improve road safety, reduce emissions, and reduce congestion with all-electric, driverless ride-hail service in cities. Almost all of the more than 40,000 vehicular-related deaths in the United States each year can be attributed to human error. We provide businesses with peace of mind knowing their employees and partners can get from A to B safely and efficiently using Cruise.
Cruise provides a sustainable and inclusive driverless ride-hail option to the substantial population of hospitality, restaurant, and student populations across the Dallas Region who regularly need safe late-night transportation. Our self-driving cars provide reliable, secure rides at the most unpredictable, and often vulnerable, times.
Cruise’s delivery business is currently operating in Phoenix through a partnership with Walmart but will continue to expand to other cities and partners as Cruise continues to scale.
What differentiates Cruise from other companies in your industry?
Guided by safety, Cruise delivers three core enablers for growth: amazing experience, low cost, and universal availability. For our riders, this means a safer, more reliable experience. Instead of working for your car, the Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) works for you, giving you back the time spent driving to do whatever you want whether it’s relaxing or catching up on work.
Cruise took a city-first approach to the self-driving challenge, tackling the hardest challenges first to build technology that can handle the mundane parts of driving as well as the most unpredictable and complex. This approach and generalizable technology enable us to deploy our cars in new cities quickly and safely. Combined with our one-of-a-kind partnership with General Motors and Honda, we are the only driverless company with fully integrated manufacturing that enables us to deliver this new transportation at scale.
Our fleet is made up of roughly 300 all-electric AVs, powered 100% by renewable energy, and our sensor technology is unique and industry-leading.
Cruise is committed to demonstrating our appreciation for every city that welcomes us. We are the only AV company that has pledged to devote a portion of our fleet to help meet community needs, committing 1% of our fleet to serve local communities. In San Francisco, we leveraged our fleet to deliver over 2.2 million meals to folks in need, and this commitment will grow as we scale and operate in more cities.
What do you enjoy most about doing business in the Dallas Region?
It is thrilling to do business in a city buzzing with diverse industries and economic opportunity. Dallas embodies the “Everything is bigger in Texas” mindset, and we’re excited to be part of the action.
Why did you decide to become a DRC member?
The DRC offers unmatched programming and networking opportunities in Dallas and across the North Texas region. When looking to do business in Dallas, the DRC is the most direct, respected avenue to connect with other business leaders and community organizations, understand the state of play in the region, and reach our target audiences.
Getting to know this community is critical to our success in the region, and we know the DRC is a valuable partner in that journey.
How has your business changed in the past five years?
We’ve come a long way since our founding in 2013. Looking back on the last few years, 2018 was hugely evolutionary for us. Foundational investments from GM, Softbank, and Honda allowed us to further our AV development, and we quickly scaled to 1,000 employees. In the years following, we unveiled our purpose-built vehicle, repurposed a fleet of Cruise vehicles to deliver meals to vulnerable San Francisco residents during the COVID-19 pandemic, partnered with Walmart on a self-driving delivery in Arizona, and began offering driverless rides on the streets of San Francisco.
Specifically in the last 18 months, Cruise has made critical technical advances that flipped the self-driving question from “if” to “where next?” With more than two million driverless miles and more than six million total autonomous miles under our belts, our focus now is on solving a new challenge: scale. We have expanded from our hometown of San Francisco to welcome riders in Austin, Phoenix, and, most recently, Houston and Dallas.