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Cruise redeploys its self-driving cars during Covid-19 to deliver vital food supplies in California

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

During Covid-19 it’s dangerous for people to be interacting with one another so companies are using autonomous technologies to help keep vital services running.

 

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As the Coronavirus pandemic, Covid-19, continues to work its way around the world companies and entrepreneurs are turning to an increasingly wide variety of new technologies to help keep the world going and stop the virus in its tracks. From AI’s and supercomputers that are hunting for new vaccines, drones that are disinfecting streets, marshalling people back indoors, and identifying sick individuals through their windows, to robots that are looking after sick patients in hospital and Robo-Trucks that are making food deliveries, and many more innovations besides – including researchers hacking human DNA to create new ways to protect people.

 

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Now Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of General Motors, has brought some of its self-driving vehicles out of their coronavirus imposed dormancy to make deliveries for a pair of food banks in San Francisco.

So far the company says it’s helped deliver 3,700 meals for the SF-Marin Food Bank and SF New Deal, two food banks serving low-income families in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cruise’s deliveries have only taken place over eight days so far, though the company says it is interested in scaling up in the near future. The company says the city of San Francisco is “aware of what we’re doing and supports the effort.”

 

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The food banks were enthusiastic in their praise for Cruise. Lenore Estrada, executive director of the SF New Deal, said Cruise’s deliveries have helped free up her organization’s volunteers to do other work, like bringing personal protective equipment to partner sites and restaurants and seeking out more sources of funding. “The support Cruise has provided has been crucial in allowing us to expand our services,” Estrada said in a statement provided by Cruise.

The company is the latest operator to discover that doing deliveries can help sidestep restrictions that would otherwise require them to keep their autonomous vehicles on ice. Cruise, along with the rest of California’s self-driving vehicle companies, paused on-road testing in mid-March after the city issued a “shelter-in-place” order banning all nonessential travel. But since then, a handful of companies have taken some tentative steps to resume testing. Last week, robot delivery startup Nuro announced that it was helping deliver medical supplies to two Bay Area field hospitals.

 

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But there’s a big difference between what Nuro is doing and what Cruise is doing. Nuro’s deliveries are being conducted on private roads with fully driverless vehicles that don’t require human backup drivers. Cruise is operating on public roads and is continuing to require that two safety drivers ride in each vehicle at all times.

Obviously, requiring two workers to ride side by side in a small vehicle would conflict with official social distancing guidelines that advise people to stay at least six feet apart from one another. Cruise says its delivery program is entirely voluntary, with backup drivers free to opt out at any time.

These workers, who are third-party contractors employed by a staffing firm called Aerotek, are supplied with personal protective equipment like masks and gloves, Cruise says. And each backup driver is paired “exclusively” with another worker and vehicle, meaning they theoretically won’t come in contact with anyone else or another vehicle during the duration of the delivery program.

 

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Initially, backup drivers at some companies complained about inadequate safety measures in place to protect them from contracting the virus. The pandemic has made it an extremely precarious time for self-driving car companies, especially those firms that have been unable to secure enough funding to sustain their operations through an extended shutdown.

Some, like Cruise and Nuro, are exploring how to get designated as an “essential business” so they can continue to operate during the shutdown, but in the meantime it looks like they’ve found a way to keep their vehicles on the road and help provide an essential service to those in need, and in the meantime we like them hope we’ll all see the back of Covid-19 sooner rather than later so we can get back to the new normal.

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