World’s biggest driverless car experiment goes haywire

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Long at the bleeding edge of culture and technology, San Francisco this month became the testbed for one of the world’s most radical trials of driverless taxis.

Regulators voted to let autonomous cars from two companies – Cruise and Waymo – circle the city’s streets, picking up passengers and charging them for trips at any time of day and night.

Unlike many previous similar experiments, the vehicles would not require safety drivers, with only software and sensors preventing passengers from getting into accidents. These were driverless cars in the truest sense.

Robot cars would share San Francisco’s hilly roads with its 150-year-old cable car system, picking up those who had snagged a spot on Cruise and Waymo’s waitlists. It felt like a taste of the future, especially in a city that is notoriously averse to bold policymaking.

But less than two weeks later, that experiment seems to be unravelling. In the days since driverless cars were given the keys to the city, a string of embarrassing incidents – from traffic jams to crashes – have threatened to set the driverless revolution back years.

Over the weekend, San Francisco’s Department of Motor Vehicles demanded that Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, reduce its fleet by 50pc after a crash with a fire engine. The decision took around 150 cars off the road. However, some want to go further: now, local politicians are seeking the reversal of the experiment before it had truly got going.
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Jeanine Nicholson, the chief of the city’s fire department, said firefighters had had to repeatedly waste time dealing with the cars, including one case in which a car with no driver had inched towards a blaze, unable to be stopped until one firefighter smashed its window. “It is not our job to babysit their vehicles,” she said.
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Yet it took just hours for things to start going wrong. California’s Public Utilities Commission approved the 24/7 service late on a Thursday. The following evening, around 10 Cruise cars caused traffic chaos when they appeared to stall around junctions in a busy part of the city.

The company initially suggested that overburdened mobile networks related to a nearby music festival had interfered with the cars. Later, Cruise blamed the incident on a single pedestrian interfering with one vehicle.

The next week, one of the company’s cars became stuck after driving into wet cement, apparently ignoring the cones marking the area off. It was forced to pay for the road to be repaved after the vehicle was recovered.

And just the following day, a Cruise vehicle collided with a fire engine responding to an emergency, after failing to recognise its sirens and stop in time. The passenger was taken to hospital by paramedics with injuries that were described as non-serious, but it meant the company had disrupted two emergency services with one incident.

Greg Dietrerich, Cruise’s general manager for San Francisco, said the crash was a unique case with “several factors that added complexity”. But the string of incidents so soon after driverless cars had been given such freedom was unfortunate at best.

World’s biggest driverless car experiment goes haywire

[Above excerpts are less than half of the full article]

• This topic was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by b.

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As if Uber and Lyft were not bad enough for the taxi industry. They should do their experimenting on country roads and let Taxi drivers make a living!

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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