Self-driving cars hit some speed bumps in San Francisco

Less than a week after a long-awaited victory that would allow San Francisco robotaxis to offer fared rides 24/7, General Motors-owned Cruise is drastically cutting back its operations in Fog City.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles, one of two agencies responsible for managing autonomous driving in the state, said in an August 18 statement that it was “investigating recent concerning incidents involving Cruise vehicles in San Francisco,” and that the company had agreed to reduce its fleet by 50%.

One of those incidents involved a Cruise robotaxi and a fire truck, which collided in an intersection. The passenger in the Cruise vehicle was transported to a hospital in an ambulance for “non-severe injuries,” the company tweeted.

As to how a robotaxi ended up in the path of an emergency vehicle responding to a late-night call, Cruise said there were “several factors that added complexity” to the incident, noting that the intersection where the collision occurred is “significantly occluded by buildings, meaning that it is not possible to see objects around the corner until they are physically very close to the intersection.”

“The AV’s ability to successfully chart the emergency vehicle’s path was complicated by the fact that the emergency vehicle was in the oncoming lane of traffic, which it had moved into to bypass the red light,” Cruise said in a statement. “The Cruise AV did identify the risk of a collision and initiated a braking maneuver, reducing its speed, but was ultimately unable to avoid the collision.”

One step forward, two steps back: The DMV’s request that Cruise cut back on AV services comes just days after Cruise and Google-owned Waymo were granted permission to expand their operations in San Francisco, a decision that faced strong pushback from local stakeholders, “including from a San Francisco Firefighters union, the San Francisco Police Officers Association, and the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association,” Tech Brew previously reported.

In a vote on August 10, Cruise won permission to expand its ride service to the entirety of the city at all times, including previously excluded steep hills and roundabouts, and in heavy rain and foggy conditions.

But the fire truck incident was just one in a string of self-driving debacles in San Francisco in the days following the expansion win:

• According to Cruise, one of its AVs “drove into a construction area and stopped in wet concrete.”
• Several AVs stalled throughout the city as festival-goers left Outside Lands, which Cruise said was due to the fact that “a large festival posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles.”
• And on the same night as the fire truck incident, another Cruise car (this one passengerless) reportedly collided with a vehicle that had run a red light.

All in all, it wasn’t Cruise’s best week. As part of its agreement with the DMV, the company will operate no more than 50 vehicles during the day, and 150 at night, “until the investigation is complete and Cruise takes appropriate corrective actions to improve road safety.”