GM admits Cruise won't be ready for commercial launch in 2019

The company will continue to scale up its San Francisco testing through the end of the year.

General Motors' Cruise division has admitted that it will not be launching commercial service in 2019 as originally planned.

Chief executive Dan Ammann has highlighted the company's growth from 40 people in 2016 to 1,500 today. The GM-owned startup has also raised $7.25 billion in funding.

"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," Ammann wrote in a blog post.

The company has also partnered with Honda to develop a new self-driving car that "completely re-imagines from the ground up what a car can be."

Rather than focusing on deploying self-driving cars to the public this year, the company will instead ramp up its San Francisco testing program that is currently giving rides to employees.

"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," Ammann added. "We are in discussions with our regulators on how this will be measured and validated. We will share more on this topic in the near future."

Unconfirmed rumors circulating last year claimed Cruise was still struggling to detect pedestrians and still a 'decade' away from a wide commercial rollout. Waymo is currently the only company offering rides to the public, however the company is still limiting service to a 100-square-mile patch of Phoenix suburbs.