Autonomous taxi company Cruise is slowly trying to reintroduce its robocars in the Bay Area, one year after the company went into freefall following a brutal collision in which one of the cars dragged an injured pedestrian.

While Waymo has managed to avoid any high-profile or injurious accidents so far, and now enjoys a monopoly in SF as far as autonomous taxis go, Cruise was not so fortunate. Both companies received their approvals to start taking paid customers in the city last summer, beginning with specific zones of the city. But within one day of that approval, a bunch of Cruise vehicles got in some sort of swarm in North Beach, causing gridlocked traffic, and the company blamed a "connectivity issue."

A week later, a Cruise vehicle poking too far into an intersection got struck by a fire truck, injuring a passenger. A Cruise vehicle got in a second crash a week after that. And then a story emerged about Cruise vehicles blocking an ambulance from leaving the scene of a traumatic injury, delaying a patient's care.

But the nail in the coffin for Cruise — temporary though it may have been — came on October 2, 2023, when a Cruise car at Fifth and Market streets struck a jaywalking pedestrian — who may have been struck by another vehicle first — and then dragged her for twenty feet before coming to a stop on top of her. The incident launched a federal probe, caused Cruise to lose its operating permit from the California DMV, and led directly to the resignation of CEO Kyle Vogt in early November.

Cruise has been slowly trying to rebuild its reputation ever since. The injured woman in the October crash won an $8-$12 million settlement from parent company General Motors. And in July, Cruise quietly started putting its vehicles back on the road, with human drivers overseeing them, in Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix.

That relaunch now swings back to the Bay Area, where a handful of Cruise cars, with people in the driver's seat, are getting back on the road in Sunnyvale and Mountain View. As the Chronicle reports, the company will put five cars out on the roads in those two Peninsula cities, for mapping purposes, this fall.

Cautiously, Cruise said in a blog post, "Resuming testing in the Bay Area is an important step forward as we continue to work closely with California regulators and local stakeholders."

A spokesperson also told the Chronicle, "While the purpose of this small-scale presence is specifically to allow employees to engage with our product for research and development purposes, we look forward to taking this step as we continue our conversations [with regulators and local officials]."

Those "conversations" likely involve goalposts and a timeline for putting Cruise cars back on the road collecting fares in San Francisco, where all that mapping and testing work is already done — and where Alphabet-owned Waymo has been raking in all the cash from the robocar-curious for the last eleven months.

Waymo has even expanded its fleet in SF and done away with its waitlist in June, making their cars nearly omnipresent in most neighborhoods, though they have not been without their snafus. And experts have surmised that it's likely just a matter of time before a Waymo vehicle also gets into an embarrassing — and potentially tragic — collision that makes a lot of headlines.