Cruise, the General Motors–owned autonomous car company, is easing its way back to restarting driverless operations—one seat at a time.
Some of the Cruise vehicles being tested in Houston no longer have human safety drivers sitting behind the steering wheel, a Cruise spokesperson told Fortune on Tuesday. But the safety drivers have not gone too far away. They’re now in the passenger-side front seat of the cars where “they maintain controls to stop the vehicle at any time.”
GM disclosed the update Tuesday in a short, and somewhat ambiguous, line in its quarterly 10-Q filing with the SEC, stating that “Cruise has resumed limited driverless testing in Houston, Texas.”
Cruise has been on a hiatus from commercial robotaxi operations in the aftermath of an incident just over a year ago in which a woman who was hit by another vehicle was run over by a Cruise robotaxi, then dragged about 20 feet and severely injured as the car tried to pull over. Regulators alleged that Cruise withheld important details of the incident from them, and Cruise voluntarily pulled its vehicles off the streets across the U.S.
Earlier this year, Cruise began testing its vehicles again in Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix, but all of this testing has involved safety drivers, who sit behind the wheel and can take control of the vehicle as necessary.
General Motors has yet to lay out any kind of formal timeline for Cruise to return to offering a paid robotaxi service, but true driverless testing is an important step for it to do so.
“We expect Cruise to return to driverless commercial AV operations based on safety and other criteria, but we have not yet determined the timing of such return,” General Motors’ earnings statement said.
With Cruise on the sidelines, Alphabet-owned Waymo has pulled ahead in the self-driving car market. Elon Musk unveiled autonomous Tesla “cybercabs” at a splashy event earlier this month, though Musk said they won’t be on the road until sometime “before 2027”—and some experts believe that’s optimistic.
As it tries to restart Cruise operations, GM has been cutting costs, although Cruise is still bleeding money. Cruise reported a loss of $435 million for the three months ended in September—down from $791 million last year, but still nearly half a billion. General Motors CEO Mary Barra has said the company is considering taking on outside investment.
