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"We're on a trajectory that most businesses dream of, which is exponential growth," Vogt said during a July call with investors. He boasted about the size of Cruise's driverless car fleet, adding that "you will see several times this scale within the next six months." Yiwen Lu has been covering the fight over the expansion of driverless taxi services in San Francisco. That’s how many times robotaxis have made unplanned stops on public streets in San Francisco since June of 2022. Google-run Waymo has a slightly smaller presence in San Francisco but announced a sweeping expansion plan immediately following the California Public Utilities Commission’s Thursday vote. The company previously offered free access to its pool of riders, but it is now able to charge users for its rides, all day and night.
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Becerra also provided the images below, showing a worker with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) inspecting the scene. Interestingly, a trail of fluid can be seen coming from beneath the car, but it's unclear if it's related to the situation or the Cruise vehicle itself. Drivers are growing frustrated with Cruise’s vehicles which keep stopping dead in traffic. Seven days after the vote, a Cruise car collided with a fire truck, injuring a passenger. "Our teams are currently doing an analysis to identify potential enhancements to the AV's response to this kind of extremely rare event," said Navideh Forghani, a Cruise spokesperson.
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Both Cruise and Waymo say their driverless cars are safer than human drivers – they don't get drunk, text or fall asleep at the wheel. The companies say they've driven millions of driverless miles without any human fatalities and the roads are safer with their autonomous systems in charge. Two days later, Cruise went further and voluntarily suspended all of its driverless operations around the country, taking 400 or so driverless cars off the road. Since then, Cruise’s board has hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to investigate the company’s response to the incident, including its interactions with regulators, law enforcement and the media. Cruise and Waymo have said that these unpredicted stops are infrequent and are the safest way to handle “edge case,” or unusual, situations. But the city asked the CPUC to slow the deployment of self-driving cars, and to force the companies to hand over more specific data on what the vehicles are doing on its streets.
Safety
He says he'd like to see the companies focus on making sure the technology is actually safe. Cruise, the self-driving car company affiliated with General Motors and Honda, is testing fully driverless cars, without a human safety driver behind the steering wheel, in San Francisco. The company is among the first to test its driverless vehicles in a dense, complex urban environment. The suspensions mark a serious setback for the driverless vehicle industry, which has faced charges of under-regulation even as Cruise and others plan to expand to new cities across the US.
Despite the bumps in the road, both Waymo and Cruise are rapidly expanding their robo-taxi programs throughout the U.S. Waymo is already giving rides in Phoenix and is testing with human safety drivers in Los Angeles and Austin. And Cruise is offering rides in Phoenix and Austin and testing in Dallas, Houston, Miami, Nashville and Charlotte. "We thought that putting cones on these [driverless cars] was a funny image that could captivate people," says one organizer.
Robotaxis Can Now Work the Streets of San Francisco 24/7
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also opened an investigation into Cruise. California’s Department of Motor Vehicles says in a statement that it has determined that Cruise’s vehicles are not safe for public operation, and that the company ”misrepresented” safety information about its autonomous vehicle technology. In a filing on the suspension, the agency says that Cruise initially provided footage showing only the collision between its vehicle and the woman. It says Cruise did not disclose information about its car's subsequent “pull-over maneuver” that dragged the woman after the initial impact, and that the DMV only obtained full footage nine days after the crash. California has ordered the company Cruise to immediately stop operations of its driverless cars in the state. The Department of Motor Vehicles said on Tuesday that it was issuing the indefinite suspension because of safety issues with the vehicles.
Who can ride.
By Andrew J. Hawkins, transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. Cruise's path to autonomous driving creates opportunities for increased mobility and independence. And, if you’re wondering what you can and cannot do in a robotaxi, check out The Standard’s handy guide here. Riders can also sign up for the waiting list through the Cruise app, which allows users to book cars.
A new way to ride
"The software can make the autonomous vehicle behave as conservatively as possible because a safety violation would be very serious," Wan says. "But this may lead to concerns on the other side, like in some cases, even though it's safe it will fail to drive normally." The cars have run red lights, rear-ended a bus and blocked crosswalks and bike paths. In one incident, dozens of confused cars congregated in a residential cul-de-sac, clogging the street. Safe Street Rebel has cataloged hundreds of near misses and blunders with Cruise and Waymo vehicles over the past few months — even without traffic cones. The lead-up to the commission's vote prompted the Safe Street Rebel group to start "coning," as they call it.
Cruise's crash highlights fragmented regulation for self-driving cars - The Washington Post - The Washington Post
Cruise's crash highlights fragmented regulation for self-driving cars - The Washington Post.
Posted: Sat, 28 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Last weekend, about 10 Cruise vehicles stopped functioning in the middle of a busy street in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, blocking traffic for 15 minutes. Mr. Pusateri said in an earlier statement that the cars had difficulty connecting to the Cruise employees who might have guided them out of the way because of a spike in cellular traffic caused by a music festival in the city’s Golden Gate Park about four miles away. Less than a day after one of its driverless taxis collided with a fire truck in a San Francisco intersection, Cruise agreed on Friday to a request from state regulators to cut in half the number of vehicles it was operating in the city. Cruise spokesperson Drew Pusateri told SFGate that the stoppages were due to a "technical issue." According to Pusateri, Cruise teams arrived at each incident within 20 minutes to recover the affected vehicles. Speaking on the issue, Pusateri stated that "if our cars encounter a situation where they aren’t able to safely proceed, they stop and turn on their hazard lights, and we either get them operating again or pick them up as quickly as possible." Forghani, the Cruise spokesperson, says the company has shared video and other information related to the incident with the California DMV and NHTSA officials.
She added that the company's approach is "with safety as our north star." GM's spokesperson says it remains committed to Cruise "as they refocus on trust, accountability and transparency." They've tallied more than 55 incidents where self-driving cars have gotten in the way of rescue operations. Those incidents include driving through yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways, running over fire hoses and refusing to move for first responders. The suspension is a major setback for Cruise, which started testing its autonomous cars in San Francisco several years ago and introduced a limited driverless taxi service in the city last year. As covered by SFGate, multiple incidents have occurred around the city with the company's autonomous fleet of Chevrolet Bolts. In one Reddit post from last week, two of the company's cars can be seen blocking traffic near the intersection of Sacramento St and Leavenworth St.
Cruise self-driving cars suspended in California over safety issues - NPR
Cruise self-driving cars suspended in California over safety issues.
Posted: Tue, 24 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The resolution passed by the commissioners said that the CPUC did not have enough information to conclude that robotaxis have been operating unsafely in the city. It says the commission will push to update the companies’ data collection requirements, including information on unplanned stops and interactions with first responders. Two people dressed in dark colors and wearing masks dart into a busy street on a hill in San Francisco. In a video released by the company, a Cruise employee is seen in the passenger seat while the car drives itself through the darkened streets of San Francisco. Cruise’s vehicles all have an emergency switch in the center channel near the gear shift in case something goes wrong, and they are also monitored remotely by Cruise employees.
However, we're rarely known for simply stopping dead in traffic and refusing to move. Cruise will need to solve these issues promptly if it is to avoid the wrath of the enraged commuters of downtown San Francisco. After the fire truck collision, the California Department of Motor Vehicles told Cruise to reduce its fleet in half, to 150 cars, while it investigated the incident. "Our folks cannot be paying attention to an autonomous vehicle when we've got ladders to throw," San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson said in an August hearing. Even before the October incident, tension over self-driving cars was simmering in San Francisco.
Members have long used street theater shenanigans to gain attention in their fight against cars and to promote public transportation. Waymo says it has a permit for 250 cars and it deploys about 100 at any given time. The Department of Motor Vehicles made Cruise cut that number in half after one of its cars collided with a firetruck last week. All it takes to render the technology-packed self-driving car inoperable is a traffic cone.
Neither Cruise nor Waymo responded to questions about why the cars can be disabled by traffic cones. An anonymous activist group called Safe Street Rebel is responsible for this so-called coning incident and dozens of others over the past few months. The group's goal is to incapacitate the driverless cars roaming San Francisco's streets as a protest against the city being used as a testing ground for this emerging technology. Cruise was approved to test fully driverless cars (also called Level 4 in industry parlance) in California on October 15th.
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