General Motors will test driverless driving

General Motors (NYSE: GM) announced that Autonomous Vehicles subsidiary Cruise has received approval to test driverless vehicles in San Francisco. The company announced that the California Department of Motor Vehicles had given it permission to abolish the human auxiliary drives on autonomous vehicles. However, the five vehicles the company will test will be restricted to certain roads and speed limits will not exceed 30 mph.

Dan Ammann, the CEO of Cruise, said in a post on Medium that the company would be putting gasoline-free driverless cars on the streets of San Francisco before the end of this year. Ammann said the safe distance of the human driver is a benchmark for self-driving vehicles and because eliminating fossil fuels in cars is the future of transportation. Cruise, majority-owned by GM with investments from the SoftBank Group and Honda, has piloted 180 self-driving vehicles in San Francisco with a driver at the wheel for safety reasons. However, with approval, the vehicles will run without a driver, but it's too early to expect a full start.

Interestingly, it's not the only cruise to get approval to test driverless vehicles, but this is a huge milestone for the company to bring its privately-operated fleet to the public. Some of the companies that the CDMV has approved to test driverless cars include Amazon.com Inc.'s (Nasdaq: AMZN) Zoox, Google's (NASDAQ: GOOGLE) Wymo, Nuro, and Autox Technologies. Ammann, a past GM president, said Cruise is expected to be the first company to have an unmanned autonomous vehicle on the streets of a major city.

However, he did not specify when the company will commercialize the vehicles for cargo or passengers. Last year, the company halted plans to commercialize the driverless car in San Francisco because more testing was required. The company says the commercial launch of the vehicles will be based on safety.