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Currently, 60 companies have an active permit to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver in California. Cruise and Waymo also ran into problems with San Francisco's police and fire departments. At government hearings, the agencies testified that the driverless cars were a nuisance.
Driverless Cars Face Setbacks In San Francisco—Here’s What To Know About The City’s Problematic Robotaxi Rollout
Based on police reports and initial video footage from Cruise, the woman was first struck by a hit-and-run human driver whose vehicle threw her into the path of the driverless car. California’s Department of Motor Vehicles last week accused Cruise of omitting the dragging of the woman from a video of the incident it initially provided to the agency. The D.M.V. said the company had “misrepresented” its technology and told Cruise to shut down its driverless car operations in the state. Still, in a recent New York Times interview, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said it wasn’t too soon to think about what might happen to the jobs of today’s professional drivers, some of whom asked the CPUC to block robotaxi expansion during comments before the vote. Vogt said Cruise has a responsibility to warn government and regulators that its technology is set to disrupt the lives of people who make a living behind the wheel.
Robotaxi testing and permits
"To be clear, human drivers will text, they'll be distracted. There's the saying, 'the lights are on, but nobody's home,'" Koopman says. Over the next few weeks, Cruise continued to expand – launching driverless robotaxi rides in Houston. Then, in a surprise announcement at the end of October, the DMV ordered Cruise to immediately stop all operations in California. On Oct. 2, a car hit a woman in a San Francisco intersection and flung her into the path of one of Cruise’s driverless taxis.
Cruise (autonomous vehicle)
Cruise provided additional details of the October 2 collision in a blog post published today. According to the company, which has 40 cameras and sensors mounted on each of its vehicles, its self-driving vehicle quickly swerved and braked in an attempt to avoid a collision with the woman, but still made impact. The vehicle then stopped but, according to Cruise, “attempted to pull over,” dragging the woman an additional 20 feet. Cruise says this sort of evasive maneuver was built into the vehicle’s software to promote safety, and is required by both California and federal regulators. Cruise spokesperson Navideh Forghani says Cruise has stayed in close contact with regulators but disputed the DMV’s timeline. She says the agency was shown video of the entire incident, including the pull-over, the day after the crash.
The GM-backed company is one of the first to launch Level 4 vehicles in a dense, complex urban setting
Both Cruise and Waymo have released studies saying their vehicles are involved in fewer crashes than human drivers. One Waymo study says it has an 85% reduction in injury-causing collisions and a Cruise study says it has a 74% reduction. Meanwhile, The Intercept reported that Cruise cars had difficulty detecting children, according to internal documents. And The New York Times reported that remote human workers had to intervene to control Cruise's driverless vehicles every 2.5 to five miles. Cruise said its car "braked aggressively to minimize the impact." It provided some news outlets with video of the incident, which ended right after the driverless car hit the woman.
Cruise Self-Driving Cars Struggled to Recognize Children - The Intercept
Cruise Self-Driving Cars Struggled to Recognize Children.
Posted: Mon, 06 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Robotaxis Can Now Work the Streets of San Francisco 24/7
"One of these self-driving cars with billions of dollars of venture capital investment money and R&D, just being disabled by a common traffic cone." The news that the company will be relying less on its operations staff during its testing comes after Cruise’s safety drivers have complained about a lack of safety standards during the pandemic and subsequent wildfires. They accuse Cruise of deploying its self-driving cars during the spring lockdown in defiance of public health orders banning nonessential travel. And they say Cruise isn’t doing enough to keep them safe during these public health crises. In addition to crashes, stalling and other problems, several riders have admitted to using the driverless cars for nefarious reasons. Cruise will continue its work on driverless cars as a commercial product, says spokesperson Navideh Forghani.
Rider Reviews
According to the DMV, Cruise can only test five driverless vehicles “on specified streets within San Francisco.” The vehicles are not allowed to exceed 30 mph, and can’t operate during heavy fog or heavy rain. On Friday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which regulates the safety of the driverless cars, asked Cruise to halve the number of vehicles it was operating in San Francisco. The Cruise vehicle’s collision with a fire truck the day before had injured a passenger in the driverless car. Earlier in the week, another Cruise vehicle got stuck in newly poured concrete on another city street. The company recalled and grounded all of its cars nationwide – nearly 1,000 vehicles. It initiated a third-party safety review of its robotaxis and hired an outside law firm to examine its response to the pedestrian incident.
GM’s Cruise Loses Its Self-Driving License in San Francisco After a Robotaxi Dragged a Person
A company spokesperson said Waymo will invite new guests gradually as the fleet expands in numbers and reach. The company would not be more specific about how long San Franciscans should expect to wait for access. Note that members of the press or government employees are not allowed to sign up. However, it is unclear when, exactly, the company plans to roll out the extended service hours that are now allowed and how quickly Cruise will add people off of the waitlist.
A new way to ride
The company has previously run initiatives to give free rides to late-night service and hospitality workers, as well as University of San Francisco students. It's unclear whether both cars had an issue, or whether the second one merely stopped because it was blocked by the one in front. A voice in the video can be heard exclaiming "there's no driver!" as others become frustrated at the stoppage. But, as robotaxis became increasingly ubiquitous throughout San Francisco, residents complained about near collisions and blunders.
Local reports showed footage of confused vehicles clogging a residential cul-de-sac, driving into wet cement at a construction site and regularly running red lights. By August, California had given Cruise permission to run around 300 robotaxis throughout San Francisco. And the company had started testing in several more cities across the country, including Dallas, Miami, Nashville and Charlotte.
It was less than two weeks ago that California regulators gave Cruise and Waymo permission to expand their driverless taxi rides to around-the-clock service. The move made San Francisco the first major city with two fleets of driverless vehicles operating at the same time. The vehicles have not been blamed for any serious crashes or deaths, but do present a number of problems that don’t impact human drivers. There have been multiple reports of cars shutting down and refusing to move when they encountered an unexpected problem like downed wires or dense fog. Under previous permits, Cruise and Waymo operated some 550 driverless cars in San Francisco, though figures from the companies indicated they would collectively have only about 400 on the road at any given time.
Today's decision by California regulators means the companies will be able to operate an unlimited number of robot cars that charge for rides on San Francisco’s streets. But the companies say their transition to a full-blown, Uber-like taxi service will take time. The 3-1 vote by the California Public Utilities Commission came in response to applications from Cruise, backed by General Motors, and Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet.
Asked whether remote operators are able to take control of the vehicle when needed, Ammann declined to answer. We’re reintroducing a small fleet of manually-operated vehicles to begin mapping with trained safety drivers behind the wheel. San Francisco’s tech community seems to largely support the cars, according to the Times.
They tallied nearly 75 incidents where self-driving cars got in the way of rescue operations, including driving through yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways, running over fire hoses and refusing to move for first responders. As 2022 wrapped up, CEO Kyle Vogt took to Twitter to post about the company's autonomous vehicles rolling onto the streets of San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix. Last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into Cruise citing pedestrian safety concerns. "We need actual people behind the wheel with a pulse and a brain that know how to maneuver in sticky situations," San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton said at Tuesday rally protesting the driverless cars. "These Cruise vehicles are dangerous on our streets. When they see tragedy or see danger or there's an obstacle in their way, all they know how to do is freeze." Forghani said Cruise provided regulators a video of the incident and is complying with the DMV's order and "pausing operations." Those cars that have a human safety driver will be allowed to continue operating in the state.
The DMV says Cruise will either have to appeal its decision or provide information about how it has addressed its technology’s “deficiencies” in order to win back its permit. Through a quirk of state law, the power to decide the robotaxis’ business fate fell to the state’s regulator best known for overseeing more established public services such as power, water, and telecommunications. The CPUC also regulates taxi and ride-hail services, giving it the final say in whether Waymo and Cruise could roll out their business model for self-driving cars full-time. Ziwen Wan, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at University of California, Irvine, has studied why driverless cars may be acting this way.
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