(Photo: A Cruise self-driving vehicle in San Francisco. Credit: Cruise)San Francisco-based self-driving vehicle company Cruise plans to power its entire EV fleet in the city on 100% renewable energy for 2020.
Cruise started in 2014 with a highway autopilot retrofitted to a car, began testing advanced self-driving the following year, and was acquired by General Motors in 2016. The company became a majority-owned subsidiary of GM two years later, receiving additional investments from SoftBank, Honda, and T. Rowe Price.
By 2019, Cruise was testing more than 150 all-electric, zero-emission autonomous vehicles in San Francisco on a daily basis. Since the fourth quarter of last year, the fleet has been powered by carbon-free renewable energy, including from 12 solar projects on school sites in Southern California, according to the company.
This year, they committed to powering the San Francisco fleet with renewables — once they can resume road testing operations. In March, right after introducing a self-driven all-electric shared vehicle called the Origin, Cruise grounded its fleet due to the covid-19 pandemic.
At the time, Cruise’s vice president of global government affairs Rob Grant said that the company was still running millions of simulations daily.
They aren’t the only autonomous vehicle company with EVs in their fleet. As the Verge’s Andrew J. Hawkins pointed out, Nuro and Waymo are including all-electric vehicles alongside fossil-fuel-burning models. One challenge, according to self-driving vehicle company Argo AI CEO Bryan Salesky, is that EVs need to spend time charging, which means less time on the road.
But Cruise is banking on long-lasting vehicle batteries along with renewable electricity to keep emissions low. “In California alone, transportation accounts for over 40% of total emissions, 70% of which come from light-duty passenger vehicles,” Tracy Cheung, senior energy fleet manager for Cruise, said in a blog post this week.
“We hope that powering our San Francisco fleet with 100% renewable energy is only a stepping stone as we explore ways to move our fleet beyond carbon-free to carbon negative power sources,” she said.
Cheung added that the company was also looking into projects that capture methane from landfills and dairy farms to create carbon-negative renewable electricity.
