Developing self-driving car technology is hard. From Tesla Inc. vehicles killing some drivers to Uber Technologies Inc. cars running over pedestrians, many a company has struggled, and today GM Cruise joined the pack.

The General Motors Co.-owned self-driving car firm announced Wednesday it’s delaying plans to roll out a commercial self-driving taxi service until at least next year because the technology is not ready for prime time.

A trial of the robotaxi service started in San Francisco in 2017 with a plan to launch a full service this year, but despite two years of testing, that’s not going to happen.

“In order to reach the level of performance and safety validation required to deploy a fully driverless service in San Francisco, we will be significantly increasing our testing and validation miles over the balance of this year, which has the effect of carrying the timing of fully driverless deployment beyond the end of the year,” Cruise Chief Executive Officer Dan Ammann said in a post on Medium.

To the company’s credit, safety is first and foremost in their decision-making. “When you’re working on the large scale deployment of mission-critical safety systems, the mindset of ‘move fast and break things’ certainly doesn’t cut it,” Ammann added. “With such high stakes, our first deployment needs to be done right and we will only deploy when we can demonstrate that we will have a net positive impact on safety on our roads.”

Cruise does likely have the talent to overcome hurdles, with Ammann sharing that the company now has 1,500 employees. Cash won’t be an issue for Cruise either, with $2.25 billion on its way from SoftBank after the Japanese telco giant obtained approval for the investment from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States July 7.

If Cruise does manage to launch a commercial robotaxi service next year, though, it won’t be the first company to do so. Waymo LLC, the former Google self-driving car project launched a commercial self-driving taxi service in Phoenix in December.

Although Waymo’s service has been a success in terms of safety, proving that developing the technology is possible. But the company has encountered an unexpected hazard: local residents. In the two years up to December, 21 incidents involving attacks on Waymo vehicles were reported, ranging from tire-slashing to a man threatening a vehicle with a gun.

Photo: Cruise