Cruise is now running 24/7 across all of San Francisco

Well, I’m excited. We took our first Cruise this weekend to get between the Richmond and Hayes Valley and it was great. We were immediately saying how much we hoped it would expand to a bigger area with better hours - I’d actually gotten into the beta a few months ago but hadn’t gotten an opportunity to use it at the right time and place.

The biggest flaw, to me, is that I can’t play my own music over Bluetooth. But just being able to select the radio station is a welcome change from the country pop lottery. I think that sort of experience quality improvement will compete hard against human driven alternatives. The Cruise drives a bit like an overcautious grandma, but I’d prefer that any day to the chance of an Uber or Lyft driver that’s aggressive or sloppy on the road. Yes you’re being recorded (I’d assume live monitored right now), but you can talk about whatever you want without potentially being interjected.

Never did get into Waymo - I see them everywhere, and it would have been really convenient for me since I live at the edge of SF without my own car. So woohoo, thanks Cruise!

I’m becoming a true believer in the self driving car vision. Even if they can’t work everywhere til the distant future, they’re already extraordinary in the places they are able to work now. I chuckled to see the headline on HN about self driving cars being a “dead end”, considering how many empty Waymos I see in traffic all the time.

I was disappointed today when I opened the Cruise app to see that the service was still only available 10 pm - 5:30 am in one region of San Francisco. Upon reading the fine print I notice that the service is only running 24/7 for Cruise employees. This tweet is really misleading.