AVSC is excited to announce the first of our member spotlight series.  We will routinely be featuring one of our members and highlighting some of their work/new developments within their organization with a focus on Safety. Our first spotlight is on Cruise and GM, who jointly joined AVSC in September 2019.

Cruise currently has a fleet of 300 all-electric AVs, powered 100% by renewable energy, and is operating driverless ridehail services for members of the public in San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix. Additionally, they will have a commercial service soon in Dallas and Houston and have announced testing in Miami, Nashville, Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Diego, Charlotte, Raleigh, DC, Seattle, and Las Vegas. 
  
Most recently, Cruise and GM supported the publication of a third-party research study with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) to present the first ever large-scale naturalistic study of the human ridehail crash rate in San Francisco.
 
This study was conducted over a two-year period and observed 5.6M miles of human ridehail driving data in San Francisco’s unique and densely-populated urban driving environment. The goal of the study is to generate a human crash rate estimate that could be used as a safety performance benchmark for ridehail drivers driving in a low-speed and dense urban driving environment. Making roads safer is central to the Cruise mission, and this white paper is a significant step in measuring road safety of human drivers in a comparable Operating Design Domain (ODD).
 
You can read the white paper here: Human Ridehail Crash Rate Benchmark

AVSC Best Practices related to these important works include:

AVSC Best Practice for Describing an Operational Design Domain: Conceptual Framework and Lexicon (AVSC00002202004)
  
AVSC Best Practice for Developing ADS Safety Performance Thresholds Based on Human Driving Behavior (AVSC00012202308)
 
AVSC thanks Cruise and GM for their contributions and appreciates their commitment to improving safety and reaching major milestones in the development and deployment of AV's.

Check back regularly on the AVSC site under the News/Events page to see who our next featured member is.