Column: My first ride in a Cruise driverless vehicle was safe. But there was a glitch

SAN FRANCISCO — My first trip in a driverless vehicle went smoothly — until the car pulled over and ended the ride.

I arranged to ride in one of the autonomous, electric Chevrolet Bolts deployed by General Motors-backed Cruise to try out self-driving technology for myself while I was here last month for a GMC Hummer EV SUV media drive.

As the new GM reporter for Automotive News, I have heard executives talk about Cruise’s plans to expand this year and beyond, and it’s important that I become familiar with the company if I’m going to track Cruise’s progress toward its growth benchmarks.

It turns out that my experience at the end of my Cruise ride was the result of a software glitch. To take a round-trip test drive, the company’s communications team recommended that I continuously reroute the vehicle through a mobile app before arriving at each programmed destination to keep it from finishing the ride.

I successfully changed destinations more than once but the app displayed a spinning wheel on my last try and wouldn’t accept my final destination. Instead, the Bolt pulled over to let me out a few miles from my hotel.

The ride otherwise was uneventful. Cruise checked all the safety boxes it needed to: The car stopped at red lights and stop signs, waited for pedestrians to cross the street, and left space between itself and a vehicle in the process of parallel parking. I generally consider myself a cautious person, and I never felt unsafe during the ride, though it was initially unsettling in the way new experiences often are. I’d venture to say I’d probably take another ride.

Winning the trust of cautious consumers will be critical. Providing a safe experience is the most important thing Cruise has to get right, over and over, if it’s going to get more people into its vehicles — and, ultimately, turn its nascent commercial service into a profitable business.

My experience got me thinking about how important the beginning and end of a driverless ride are to building consumer trust. If I were to ride again, I think I would be more nervous about whether the car would reach my intended destination than about whether it would keep me safe.

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt has said he is interested in knowing whether people call Cruise when they want to go somewhere, or whether they drive or hail a ride with a human-operated driver. “That’s really how I think about competition and whether or not we’re succeeding in the market,” Vogt said at last month’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

Could an experience like mine be what pushes someone to drive or call Uber or Lyft instead? It’s easy to imagine a scenario where destinations change at the last minute, such as having the wrong address or discovering that a restaurant has an hourlong wait. There’s a reasonable degree of confidence that a human driver would simply drive on to a new spot. We haven’t yet learned what to do if a driver isn’t there.

Cruise told me the vehicles do allow consumers to reroute once they’ve arrived at their programmed destination, before they get out of the car, if the surroundings don’t feel safe or if their plans change. I was not able to get the vehicle to keep moving once it pulled over. I don’t know if I would have been able to had the software worked as designed. Cruise says the glitch I experienced has been addressed in a recent update, so I’d need to try it again to see whether that has changed.

It’s good that Cruise appears to be mindful of this as the company expands its service. Consumers need to trust both that the ride will be safe and that they’ll get where they need to go.