SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today, Faction Technology, Inc., a driverless-technology company offering solutions that solve inefficiencies in micro-logistics and vehicles on demand, announced it is bringing driverless delivery to portions of the San Francisco Bay Area. Faction’s first partner is Cocola Bakery, which is using Faction to reliably deliver to its customers around the metro region. Deliveries will be made in lightweight, electric vehicles based on three wheel EV platforms from Arcimoto, Inc. (NASDAQ: FUV) and from ElectraMeccanica (NASDAQ: SOLO). Since July, Faction has made regular deliveries to the bakery’s customers and it’s now looking to add additional delivery partners in the coming months.

Equipped with Faction’s DriveLink® and TeleAssist® technologies, the company’s vehicle combines fleet autonomy with remote human teleoperation to carry out its deliveries. These technologies allow faction to provide businesses like Cocola Bakery with a delivery service that seamlessly delivers goods via a driverless fleet in an affordable, safe, and predictable way.

“Cocola Bakery and our customers have been ecstatic with the services Faction has provided us so far,” said Amir Aliabadi, CEO of Cocola Bakery. “We are now able to quickly, affordably, and reliably deliver our products to customers around the Bay Area, something we couldn’t easily accomplish before due to inconsistent gig-worker services.”

Through this initial launch, Faction continues to develop the technology powering its remote and driverless delivery solutions. New customer routes are first qualified with vehicles using safety drivers, in addition to being supervised by TeleAssist operators. System performance and road data are collected during every delivery to aid faction in consistently improving its technology and further expanding its services for Cocola Bakery and future customers.

“Our partnership with Cocola is just the beginning of what we have planned for Faction,” said Faction CEO, Ain McKendrick. “We’re achieving our cost and delivery targets while securing the data necessary to bring Faction and our technology to more partners in the coming year. The next phase is to make our services available to additional commercial customers in the Bay Area – restaurant chains, hardware stores, auto parts stores, and others – to maximize the use of our operating fleet while streamlining delivery in an affordable, reliable, and seamless way way.”

Faction is expanding its delivery services within the San Francisco Bay Area, and is currently opening up driverless delivery for other partners starting at under $2 per mile. Businesses interested in Faction and what its technology can do for them should contact Faction with the information below.

For more information on Faction and Cocola Bakery, visit www.faction.us or www.cocolabakery.com.

About faction

Faction Technology, Inc. is a Silicon Valley startup that develops driverless solutions based on light electric vehicles. Founded in February 2020, Faction is on a mission to revolutionize micro-logistics and vehicles-on-demand. The company believes the future of sustainable transportation is to develop driverless vehicles that are safe, cost-effective, and right-sized to serve a range of use cases for both business and passenger transportation needs. Faction currently powers driverless delivery in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, and will expand into other metro regions in 2023. Faction also partnered with GoCar Tours, Inc., to facilitate driverless delivery of GoCar EV Sport Tour vehicles from GoCar’s depots to select pickup counters at partner locations in cities including Las Vegas, Monterey, San Francisco, and San Diego. For more information visit www.faction.us.

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Photo: Courtesy Thomas Smith

CRuise, a department of General Motors, today officially opened its San Francisco driverless car service to the public. Registrations began this morning for a public waitlist for those seeking to use the company’s driverless car service in the city.

If you live, work, or move through San Francisco, you’ve almost certainly seen Cruise’s cars in action. They’re little white vehicles emblazoned with a big orange Cruise logo on the side, and bristling with sensors and scanners. The equipment attached to each vehicle includes cameras and LIDAR sensors that let the cars “see” the road around them as they navigate the city. Although the cars have been capable of self-driving in San Francisco for some time, most were shuttling around safety drivers or members of the Cruise team.

Until now. This morning, a Cruise spokesperson told me in an email that “As of today we are now offering the opportunity for members of the public to take free fully driverless rides in Cruise vehicles.” A few members of the public have already participated; according to the spokesperson, team members “have been nominating public riders over the past few days, and a few non-employees already have participated in this opportunity.”

Cruise’s new move allows the company to open up its driverless rides more broadly. It’s unclear exactly when this will happen, but the program is dubbed the “Cruise Rider Community program” and anyone in San Francisco can sign up at https://www.getcruise.com/. You need to enter a bit about your location and driving habits (where you live and work in the city, for example) and provide an email address to sign up for the list. The spokesperson told me that “people who are nominated by employees or sign up on the waitlist will be incorporated into the pipeline to be among our first public riders.” So unless you have a friend at Cruise, jump on the list now if you want to try out a driverless ride.

Initially, rides are likely to be free for some time. The spokesperson told me that “we are the only AV company in California to receive a permit (via the CA DMV) that allows for driverless vehicles to carry members of the public.” The spokesperson told me that Cruise has applied for an additional permit to charge for driverless rides, but has not yet received that permit. Down the road, Cruise likely envisions this becoming a replacement for services like Uber and Lyft, with paying customers moving around cities in their driverless cars.

What’s a Cruise driverless ride like? I have no idea, since Cruise hasn’t let me ride yet, despite lots of pleading and cajoling. For a sense of the experience, you can check out a blog post from Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt. In the post, Vogt also shares that Cruise has raised $1.35 billion in investment to continue building their driverless car service.

San Francisco is likely to be a major testing group for Cruise for a while. In an earlier conversation with Cruise, I learned that the company chose to test its cars in San Francisco in part because of the city’s challenging geography (think nearly vertical hills and, well, Lombard Street). As of June of last year, the cars have racked up over 2 million miles of driving in the city. That means Cruise probably knows San Francisco better than any other place in the world. For better or worse, we’re likely to be one of the first places these kinds of driverless cars roll out.

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Cruise might be the first off the gate, but they have plenty of competition. Google spinoff Waymo has been testing its own driverless cars in the city for some time, too. They’re made by Jaguar, and are a good deal fancier looking than Cruises’ vehicles. It’s likely that they’ll begin testing out public driverless rides soon, too.

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Moveable explores the future of transportation, infrastructure, energy, and cities.

For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while loading with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them in order to operate safely and analyze instances where they don’t.

While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may offer one day, they don’t publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.

“Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads,” says a San Francisco Police department training document obtained by Motherboard via a public records request. “Investigations has already done this several times.”

The document released to Motherboard is a three-page guide for how officers should interact with autonomous vehicles (AVs), especially ones that have no human driver inside. It outlines basic procedures such as how to interact with the vehicles (”Do not open the vehicle for non-emergency issues” and ”Do not pull vehicles over unless a legitimate law enforcement action exists”) as well as whether to issue a citation for a moving violation for a car with no human driver (“No citation can be issued at this time if the vehicle has no one in the driver’s seat” but an incident report should be written instead). And the section titled “Investigations” has two bullet points advising officers of their usefulness in collecting footage.

Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm.

“This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous vehicles will have even more of that data from capturing the details of the world around them. “So when we see any police department identify AVs as a new source of evidence, that’s very concerning.”

“​​As companies continue to make public roadways their grounds testing for these vehicles, everyone should understand them for what they are—rolling surveillance devices that expand existing widespread spying technologies,” said Chris Gilliard, Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center . “Law enforcement agencies already have access to automated license plate readers, geofence warrants, ring doorbell footage, as well as the ability to purchase location data. This practice will extend the reach of an already pervasive web of surveillance.”

Waymo and Cruise are the two AV companies mentioned in the training document, although more have permits to test driverless cars in California (the state grants permission through the DMV, not the city). A Waymo spokesperson told Motherboard the company “requires law enforcement agencies who seek information and data from Waymo to follow valid legal processes in making such requests (eg secure and present a valid warrant, etc.). Our policy is to challenge, limit or reject requests that do not have a valid legal basis or are overly broad.” The company spokesperson also says they do not collect data “to identify individuals.” A Cruise spokesperson told Motherboard, “We are working closely with law enforcement on our common goal of making our roads safer. We share footage and other information when we are served with a valid warrant or subpoena, and we may voluntarily share information if public safety is at risk. Cruise has always worked closely with the communities we serve to make transportation safer, cleaner, and more accessible and will continue to do so.”

SFPD’s use of AVs as mobile surveillance cameras follows the practices of the Chandler Police Department in Arizona, where Waymo has been testing AVs since 2017. But previous reports indicated these were rare instances involving traffic crimes like hit and runs. SPFD did not respond to a Motherboard email asking for more details on when and how often it sought footage from AVs.

The use of AVs as an investigative tool echoes how Ring, a doorbell and home security company owned by Amazon, became a key partner with law enforcement around the country by turning individual consumer products into a network of cameras with comprehensive coverage of American neighborhoods easily accessible to police. Police departments around the country use automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to track the movements of vehicles. The EFF has sued the SFPD for accessing business improvement district live cameras to spy on protestors.

Privacy advocates and researchers have long warned about the implications of increasingly sophisticated cars, but many of these warnings are essentially extensions of the privacy concerns of smartphones, where consumer technology tracks your movements and behavior, anonymizes it, and sells it to third parties in a manner that can be reverse engineered to identify individuals. They rarely imagine a scenario where cars on the road are constantly recording the world around them for later use by police departments.

It is the combination of using fixed location camera networks with rolling networks of autonomous vehicle cameras and data that scares privacy advocates most. “​​The holistic outcome of these combined moving and fixed networks is a threat that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Schwartz said. “Working together, [they can] more effectively turn our lives into open books.”

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Photo: Amy Osborne/AFP (Getty Images)

Have you ever wondered if we live in a cyberpunk dystopia? Could you ever imagine the modern world being called “a dehumanized, high-tech future,” or picture incredibly advanced technology existing only to serve the whims of the few while the many live as workers or keyboard cowboy outlaws? Does the quote “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed” feel at all relevant to your daily life?

While you ponder those questions, consider this:The San Francisco Police Department is now using footage from autonomous vehicle tests in criminal investigations. Those Cruise and Waymo cars, recently permitted to shuttle passengers around the city, now serve double duty as roving 24/7 police surveillance. Phillip K Dick, eat your heart out.

Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)

As reported by former Jalop Aaron Gordon at Vice’s motherboard, the San Francisco Police Department has written up a series of guidelines for how its officers should interact with autonomous vehicles. Among the other entries in the list (“Do not pull vehicles over unless a legitimate law enforcement action exists” is my personal favorite) the department mentions AVs’ uses in investigations — and states that SFPD has already used them for surveillance. From motherboard:

the document released to Motherboard is a three-page guide for how officers should interact with autonomous vehicles (AVs), especially ones that have no human driver inside. It outlines basic procedures such as how to interact with the vehicles (”Do not open the vehicle for non-emergency issues” and ”Do not pull vehicles over unless a legitimate law enforcement action exists”) as well as whether to issue a citation for a moving violation for a car with no human driver (“No citation can be issued at this time if the vehicle has no one in the driver’s seat” but an incident report should be written instead). And the section titled “Investigations” has two bullet points advising officers of their usefulness in collecting footage.

Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm.

Give the whole piece over at motherboard a read, and then start stocking up on cheetah prints and chain wallets. The future is now.

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The rear window of a Waymo Chrysler Pacifica robotaxi is seen while parked at a Target store in Tempe, Arizona, U.S. August 31, 2021. REUTERS/Paresh Dave

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SAN FRANCISCO, March 21 (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Waymo unit said on Monday that it is ready to remove safety drivers from its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, without elaborating on the timeframe for launching fully driverless services.

Waymo in August started giving autonomous rides free of charge to a limited number of people in San Francisco, with safety drivers on board, using its Jaguar electric vehicles.

Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said on Monday that it has given hundreds of people ‘robo-taxi’ rides for the past six months since the rollout in the densely populated city.

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The planned driverless operation would mark “a major step on our path to deploying a fully autonomous commercial service,” Mawakana said in a blog posting.

Waymo and its rival Cruise, majority owned by General Motors (GM.N), earlier this month obtained permits from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to allow them to charge riders for trips with a safety driver present in California.

They need to obtain separate permits from the CPUC to start collecting fares for driverless passenger service in California.

Waymo declined to comment on the status of its driverless permit application with CPUC.

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Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Additional reporting by Dave Paresh; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Kenneth Maxwell

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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On Apr. 10, a video went viral after it was posted online because it showed a driverless GM Cruise car getting pulled over in San Francisco, California, by police who found the car did not have any driver behind the wheel.

Driverless Cruise Car Got Pulled Over by Cops

The video was originally posted on Apr. 1, but it did not go viral until nine days after. It showed a GM Cruise car getting pulled over to the side of the road and stopped as a cop approached the driver’s side before accelerating to cross an intersection and pull off further down the road.

A bystander can be heard yelling their disbelief when no driver was seen inside the car even though it was moving.

GM Cruise posted on its corporate Twitter account and said that the Cruise behaved as expected. GM Cruise said that their AV yielded to the police vehicle, then pulled over to the nearest safe location, as intended.

An officer contacted a GM Cruise personnel, and there was no citation issued.

Also Read: Cruise lets you convert your jalopy into Google-type self-driving car for just $10,000

GM Cruise told CNBC that the San Francisco Police Department has a dedicated phone number available at all times for officers and authorities to call when the automaker’s driverless vehicles get pulled over.

The San Francisco Police Department did not immediately return requests for more information about the situation.

The episode showed some of the situations that can happen as driverless cars become more common on the streets of San Francisco.

GM Cruise is a GM subsidiary, and it began to offer nighttime rides to the public in early 2022 in San Francisco in driverless cars, even though it is not yet charging and riders need to apply for a waitlist first.

Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is planning to offer free driverless rides in its cars in San Francisco to members of a testing program and has completed thousands of rides without a driver in Arizona.

Nuro has a deployment permit to operate driverless cars in San Francisco as well, but the startup is mainly focused on delivery and not taxi service.

GM Gets Approval for Driverless Vehicles

According to Arstechnica, on Feb. 22, GM Cruise was able to successfully get permission from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA to put the driverless vehicles into commercial service.

Cruise stated that the vehicle is a zero-emission, shared, electric vehicle that has been designed from the ground up to operate without a human driver. This means that it does not rely on certain human-centered features, like a steering wheel, to operate.

Cruise said that its petition in Feb. demonstrates how the Origin objectives of existing standards safely and helps enable future autonomous vehicle regulations.

The AV cars will be manufactured at GM’s Factory Zero in Michigan. According to Reuters, the production is expected to increase in 2022 and will go nationwide in 2023.

The GM Cruise driverless vehicles can be used as robotaxis that can pick up deliveries and people. The vehicle can work on busy streets, highways, and intersections.

Related Article: General Motors, Cruise Unveil Modified Chevrolet Bolt EVs As First Self-Driving Car For Mass Production

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Written by Sophie Webster

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Alphabet’s (GOOGL) autonomous driving unit Waymo launched its fully driverless ride-hailing service in San Francisco. The move marks an attempt to catch up to rival Cruise, which opened its fully driverless ride service to the public in the city a month ago after initially rolling it out to its staff.

Similarly, Waymo is also offering fully driverless rides to its employees in San Francisco before opening it up to the public. Waymo’s autonomous taxis have been operating in San Francisco for months in a test program, with a human driver behind the wheel. It is now removing human drivers, so the cars will be moving alone to pick up and drop off riders.

While it is the first time Waymo is offering fully driverless rides in San Francisco, it has been offering the service in parts of Arizona’s capital Phoenix, for a few years. The launch in San Francisco comes as Waymo also prepares to expand the service to more areas in Phoenix.

$39 Billion at Stake in Robotaxi Market

Cruise and Waymo have their sights on the potentially lucrative robotaxi market, whose global size is forecast to exceed $1 billion in 2023 and reach $38.6 billion by 2030. Removing human drivers can enable companies to cut their operating costs, which could lead to a more profitable business.

Cruise is initially offering the public free rides as it awaits a regulatory green light to charge fares. Waymo is already charging customers for taking its fully driverless rides in Phoenix.

Cruise and Waymo are units of Alphabet and General Motors (GM), respectively; however, both have also received funding from outside investors. Waymo is backed by Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Mubadala Investment Company. Meanwhile, Cruise is backed by SoftBank, Honda Motor Company (HMC),Microsoft (MSFT), and Walmart (WMT).

What Does Waymo’s Move Mean for Alphabet’s Stock?

Waymo belongs to Alphabet’s Other Bets division, which houses mostly experimental ventures, such as Verily in health technology and Loon in internet service. Other Bets revenue declined to $181 million in Q4 2022, from $196 million in the same quarter the previous year. But the division’s operating loss increased to $1.45 billion from $1.14 billion a year ago.

Alphabet may be able to reduce its Other Bets losses once Waymo begins to charge customers for its fully driverless rides in San Francisco and expands the service in Phoenix.

Wall Street’s Take

On March 29, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak reiterated a Buy rating on Alphabet stock without assigning it a price target. The analyst cautions that the Russia-Ukraine war could reduce online ad spending.

Consensus among analysts is a Strong Buy based on 30 Buys. The average Alphabet price target stands at $3,490 and implies upside potential of 22% to current levels. Shares have gained 38% over the past year.

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TipRanks’ Stock Investors tool shows that investor sentiment is currently Very Positive on Alphabet, with 2.6% of portfolios tracked by TipRanks increasing their exposure to GOOGL stock over the past 30 days.

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The post Waymo Brings Absolutely Driverless Rides to San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

• The company is initially limiting the rides to its employees before opening up to the public.
• Waymo’s autonomous vehicles have been operating in San Francisco, but with safety specialists in the driver’s seat.
• The company first began offering autonomous rides in Arizona in 2017.

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Google’s self-driving startup Waymo has begun operating fully driverless rides in San Francisco, the company announced on Wednesday.

The company said that the service is just for its employees at the moment, but it hopes to open the service to the general public soon. The company’s vehicles have been operating in the city for years, but with safety specialists in the driver’s seat.

“This morning in San Francisco, a fully autonomous all-electric Jaguar I-PACE, with no human driver behind the wheel, picked up a Waymo engineer to get their morning coffee and go to work,” the company said on their website.

The company first began offering autonomous rides in the East Valley are of Phoenix, Arizona in 2017. It went fully driverless there in 2020 when Waymo took human safety drivers out of the vehicles.

In addition to San Francisco, the company will now expand its fully automated services to downtown Phoenix, the company said, again initially with company employees before opening up to the general public.

“We’re particularly excited about this next phase of our journey as we officially bring our rider-only technology to San Francisco — the city many of us at Waymo call home,” Waymo Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in the announcement.

San Francisco has been the location of a number of automated vehicle trials, with California officials allowing a record number of them in 2021. Collisions involving autonomous vehicles also increased sharply that year as a result.

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Employees of Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of General Motors, will be the first to jump inside one of the company’s autonomous vehicles that operate in San Francisco without a human driver in the front seat. Certain members of the public will also be able to ride, but they won’t be charged a fare.

Cruise co-founder, CTO and president Kyle Vogt was reportedly the first to ride the driverless AV, and he gushed about it all over Twitter.

1) Monday night was a night I’ll never forget. I’m still speechless. I got to take the first ride, by anyone, ever, in a *driverless* robotaxi on the streets of San Francisco.

This was officially ride #1 for @Cruise. Full story and vids below.https://t.co/GDjVcvMrvK

— Kyle Vogt (@kvogt) November 3, 2021

“Around 11pm Monday night we launched an AV without anyone inside for the first time,” tweeted Vogt. “Until now we’ve been testing with humans in the driver’s or passenger’s seat, so this was a first. It began to roam around the city, waiting for a ride request. At 11:20pm I used the Cruise app and summoned my first ride. After a few minutes, one of the Cruise AVs (named Sourdough) drove up to me and pulled over. Nobody was inside the car. I pressed the ‘start ride’ button and the AV smoothly pulled back into traffic.”

Vogt also said he requested five more rides that night. The rides had to be at night because according to the stipulations of Cruise’s “driverless deployment permit” from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the company can only operate driverless between the hours of 10 pm and 6 am and at a max speed of 30 miles per hour Cruise received the permit in early October, which allows the company to deploy its vehicles without a human onboard, as well as charge fees for delivery services, but crucially not ride-hailing services.

Cruise’s first human-less deployment comes about a week after GM CEO Mary Barra said the company is confident that Cruise will begin commercial driverless ride-hailing and delivery operations by next year. Cruise has yet to apply for the final permit it needs, which would be from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), to be able to charge for robotaxi services. Until such time, only Cruise employees and non-paying members of the public will be riding around in Sourdough and other human-less AVs.

Cruise told TechCrunch it doesn’t break out numbers for how many driverless AVs are permitted, nor does it have any updates on when it expects to apply for its final permit from CPUC.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that employees of Cruise would be able to ride in the driverless AVs. Cruise has just confirmed that certain members of the public will also be allowed to ride, but didn’t specify who would qualify to ride. Cruise has not opened its driverless service to members of the general public yet.

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