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California has suspended driverless vehicles operated by the General Motors subsidiary Cruise in the city of San Francisco—just two months after the state began allowing the robotaxis to pick up paying passengers around the clock. The suspension stems from a gruesome incident on October 2 in which a human-driven vehicle hit a female pedestrian and threw her into the path of a Cruise car. The driverless Cruise car hit her, stopped, and then tried to pull over, dragging her approximately 20 feet. Both Cruise and Waymo say their vehicles are far safer than human drivers and compared to humans they've had relatively few incidents. They say they've driven millions of driverless miles without any human fatalities or life-threatening injuries.
Autonomous vehicles are programmed to be overly conservative
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. “Some of that’s beyond the reach of any one individual company,” he said.
GM’s Cruise robotaxis are back in Phoenix — but people are driving them
Ammann was president of GM and went to Cruise to prepare self-driving technology for commercialization. Since then, he has been expanding the company by hiring more technology experts. Earlier this year, he named former Delta Air Lines Inc. executive Gil West as chief operating officer.
Cruise, GM's robo-taxi service, suspends all driverless operations nationwide
But I imagine a lot of those drivers are frustrated that there are all these self-driving cars that might take their positions. As many as a dozen stalled Cruise cars blocked the streets in a neighborhood in the north part of the city. The company said that it was because all of the people at Outside Lands disrupted the cellphone signal or the signal that the Cruise cars use to operate. Let’s say there are 10 fire trucks coming down to stop a blaze in San Francisco.
Billions of dollars in losses so far and Cruise is ‘just getting started’
Cruise said its engineers are examining that accident and working on way for its robotaxis to improve their response "to this kind of extremely rare event." “Phase 1 is to familiarize our fleet with additional, diverse road conditions while collecting data,” the company said at the time in a tweet. For example, the deployment decision directs the Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division (CPED) of the CPUC to include whether or not a citation was issued in a collision or incident involving law enforcement in its categories of incidents for reporting. In addition, to support easier access, CPED conceded to post Cruise’s driverless deployment operational design domains on its website.
While Cruise’s application for a driverless taxi service in San Francisco won widespread backing from supporters hoping the technology will become viable in other cities, some transportation experts urged the Public Utilities Commission to move cautiously. The CPUC, and Gov. Gavin Newsom, in Peskin’s view, are putting big money ahead of basic public safety. The CPUC “has not been held in high esteem by the people of California for a very long time,” Peskin said. All five CPUC commissioners were appointed by Newsom, including the former Cruise attorney. One day after California green-lighted a massive expansion of driverless robotaxis in San Francisco, the implications became clear. The vehicle’s lack of traditional human controls means that Cruise needs an exemption from the federal government’s motor vehicle safety standards, which require vehicles to have a steering wheel and pedals.
Driverless cars can now operate like taxis in San Francisco, raising safety concerns
"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." 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. Waymo says it has a permit for 250 cars and it deploys about 100 at any given time.
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. "We thought that putting cones on these [driverless cars] was a funny image that could captivate people," says one organizer. "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." It's unclear what this week's suspension of driverless operations will mean for Cruise, and perhaps the future for AVs as a whole. That’s one of the reasons Cruise’s newly approved driverless service in San Francisco is being so tightly controlled.
In 2022, former Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt — who stepped down amid last year’s controversy — told investors that Cruise had “de-risked the technical approach” by applying what worked well in San Francisco to similar ride-share markets. Still, some are skeptical of Cruise's response to the accident and point to lingering questions. Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies automated vehicles, wants to know “who knew what when? Cruise is also being investigated by U.S. regulators after receiving reports of potential risks to pedestrians and passengers. Cruise co-founder, CTO and president Kyle Vogt was reportedly the first to ride the driverless AV, and he gushed about it all over Twitter. Vogt said that NHTSA is expected to make a decision soon on the company’s request, perhaps sometime later this month.
GM's Cruise robotaxi unit relaunches - with human drivers - in Phoenix - Morningstar
GM's Cruise robotaxi unit relaunches - with human drivers - in Phoenix.
Posted: Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The company said Tuesday that it will begin collecting road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix. In recent months, Cruise has been in talks with officials in 20 metropolitan areas where it previously operated cars in preparation to lay the foundation for eventual robotaxi service. Phoenix is a natural place to start as Cruise already has vehicles in the area and city officials were open to the idea of its return, said a person familiar with the plan, who asked not to be identified.
The vote allows General Motors-owned Cruise and Waymo, owned by Google’s Alphabet, to charge fares for driverless service and grow the fleet as large as they’d like. Cruise has said it plans eventually to deploy thousands of robotaxis in San Francisco. Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo self-driving vehicle unit is collecting fares in the Phoenix area and has a permit to operate autonomous vehicles with a safety driver in parts of San Francisco and San Mateo counties, the California DMV said last week. But the companies defined these freezing incidents differently, and robotaxi critics say they aren’t transparent about where and when their vehicles get stuck. Opponents of autonomous taxi expansions, including the Teamsters, have vowed to slow down the growth of companies such as Waymo. A bill pending in the California Senate would give cities and counties authority over robotaxi services — a power that currently resides with state government agencies.
GM's Cruise to Resume Testing Robotaxi Service in Phoenix - Yahoo Finance
GM's Cruise to Resume Testing Robotaxi Service in Phoenix.
Posted: Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The suspension of its operations already pushed out its timeline for hitting revenue targets, and GM recently opted to appoint one of its own, Craig Gilden, to act as a kind of babysitter and exercise greater oversight. If successful, it could process visual data directly onboard with almost no need for coded commands or expensive sensor suites, leapfrogging the industry in the process. Failure, however, could be catastrophic, with over 400,000 cars currently equipped to run FSD beta. Even though the driver, who fled the scene and remains at large, shoulders much of the blame, Vogt’s company had already in the doghouse after another of his vehicles collided with a fire truck in August.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, members of Safe Street Rebel continue to go out at night and stalk the vehicles one cone at a time. "It's a reminder that in this very high-tech world, the most low-tech things can literally put a wrench in the machine." “The reception from Angelenos so far has been exceptional, and we look forward to welcoming more riders into our service over time,” he said in a statement. Just reaching this point has taken far longer than many companies envisioned when they began working on the autonomous technology. North Beach resident Jeffrey Bilbrey observes the line of bricked robotaxis from his apartment window.
It sounds funny, but it’s literally traffic cones that activists are placing on top of robotaxi sensors so that they can’t move. The city has even taken it into their own hands where, a firefighter in an emergency situation, they coned a Cruise car because they didn’t want it to keep moving into an emergency situation. That approval came over a chorus of protests, including some lodged by police and fire officials who asserted the driverless vehicles had been impeding traffic in emergencies during a testing phase. Cruise first soft-launched its robotaxi service in Chandler, a city southeast of Phoenix, in December 2022. In early August, the company expanded its radius in the Phoenix area by 20x to include Tempe and Scottsdale.
Cruise began mapping Dubai in July 2022 in preparation for a planned launch in 2023. The company said it hopes to put Cruise Origins on Dubai’s streets this year. Dubai’s RTA confirmed in April that Cruise has several autonomous Chevy Bolts — at least five can be seen in one video — collecting data and testing in the Jumeirah 1 area, a residential area on the coast. Cruise was Barra’s biggest bet yet on Silicon Valley, with GM snapping up a whopping 80% of the innovative startup. This investment offered her century-old carmaker the chance to finally be viewed as a disruptive tech company with valuation multiples more akin to buzzy software companies than those of a lowly metal-bender beset by a meddlesome unionized workforce. In the aftermath, Cruise grounded its entire fleet of robo-taxis to earn the public’s trust again.
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