Driving a taxi in city traffic

What was ceded is driving inside a domain the operator defines for itself: mapped streets in a short list of metropolitan areas, speeds and weather within stated limits, remote assistance reachable when the car stops and cannot decide. The scale is real rather than demonstrative, more than 250,000 paid trips a week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin by May 2025, and roughly double that a year later. Not ceded: driving outside the mapped domain, in snow, on an unsurveyed road, and above all the answering for a collision, which falls on a company and a regulator rather than on the machine. The California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise's driverless permits on 24 October 2023, after a pedestrian was dragged twenty feet and the footage was not shown, which is a fair measure of how narrow the licence is and how quickly it can be taken back.