In a series of incidents, the GM subsidiary lost contact with its autonomous vehicles, leaving them frozen in traffic and trapping human drivers.
Cruise began testing its autonomous technology in San Francisco in 2015, with safety drivers behind the wheel to intervene if something went wrong. Five years later, the DMVfor the company to test its cars without humans onboard. Early this year, Cruise invited members of the public to apply to join a select group of testers in the city, who can summon completely driverless rides with an app.
Around midnight on June 21, nearly two weeks after Cruise won permission to charge for rides, San Francisco resident Stephen Merity was walking through the city’s downtown Tenderloin neighborhood when he saw a driverless Cruise stopped in a crosswalk, blocking a right-hand turn lane. When he returned a few minutes later, he found two more Cruise vehicles stopped behind the first.
Late one night in June, Stephen Merity encountered three autonomous cars stuck in downtown San Francisco.Merity and the robot’s cheerleader told a human driver patiently waiting between two of the motionless Cruise vehicles that she should steer her SUV around the robotaxis. The vehicles had been stuck for at least 10 minutes before he left to go home, Merity says.
The scene initially struck Merity, who works in machine learning, as pretty funny. But after more reflection, he turned anxious about the technology. When he saw a news report a week about the June 28 outage, he was dismayed. “I had assumed alarm bells were going off at Cruise HQ and they were thinking of pulling the cars off the road and putting drivers back in,” Merity says.
Losing connection with its vehicles, and especially its backup safety systems, might violate Cruise’s permits to operate in California, says Bryant Walker Smith, an associate professor at the South Carolina School of Law who studies autonomous vehicles.
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