Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company owned by General Motors, will launch a robot taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona, and Austin, Texas, before the end of 2022, the company's CEO said.

The company currently operates a ride-hailing service in just one city, San Francisco, where it received permission to start charging customers for rides earlier this year, the Telegraph reports.

This service took years to grow;

Cruise now says he can do the same in two new cities in 90 days.

The company has been doing autonomous testing in Phoenix through a distribution partnership with Walmart.

But it said it has yet to put any vehicles in Austin, which Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said was unprecedented.

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"In Austin, what I'm really excited about is that we're going from zero footprint — no map, no infrastructure on the ground — to our first revenue-generating driverless rides in about 90 days," Vogt said during a speech at a conference at Goldman Sachs.

"This is something that people thought could take years."

Indeed, it took years for Cruise to launch his driverless paid taxi service in San Francisco.

The company originally planned to introduce a commercial robot-taxi service there in 2019, but failed to do so after determining that the technology was not quite ready.

/Telegraph/

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