Two companies race to deploy robotaxis in San Francisco. The city wants them to hit the brakes.
The city’s transportation officials sent letters this week to California regulators asking them to halt or scale back the expansion plans of Cruise and Waymo.
Jan. 27, 2023, 5:38 PM EST
By David Ingram
SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco is trying to slow the expansion of robotaxis after repeated incidents in which cars without drivers stopped and idled in the middle of the street for no obvious reason, delaying bus riders and disrupting the work of firefighters.
The city’s transportation officials sent letters this week to California regulators asking them to halt or scale back the expansion plans of two companies, Cruise and Waymo, which are competing head-to-head to be the first to offer 24-hour robotaxi service in the country’s best-known tech hub.
The outcome will determine how quickly San Francisco and possibly other cities forge ahead with driverless technology that could remake the world’s cities and potentially save some of the 40,000 people killed each year in American traffic crashes.
The episode adds another chapter to the complicated history of self-driving cars, an idea that has been teased by technologists as a possibility in the future while facing a variety of setbacks in the past few years. Waymo offers fully autonomous rides in Phoenix, while Tesla lets some of its owners test “driver assistance” features that are the subject of a federal investigation. A self-driving Uber test vehicle struck and killed a woman in 2018.
Some believe self-driving cars will never happen on a wide scale, but they’ve been gaining momentum in San Francisco.
Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors, won permission last year to use 30 vehicles as robotaxis in parts of San Francisco between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. The vehicles do not have backup human drivers during that time. The company has since received permission to test driverless cars any time of day, but it needs a signoff from the California Public Utilities Commission to expand the hours of its commercial service.
Neither vehicles from Cruise or Waymo have killed anyone on the streets of San Francisco, but the companies need to overcome their sometimes comical errors, including one episode last year in which a Cruise car with nobody in it slowly tried to flee from a police officer.
In one recent instance documented on social media and noted by city officials, five disabled Cruise vehicles in San Francisco’s Mission District blocked a street so completely that a city bus with 45 riders couldn’t get through and was delayed for at least 13 minutes. Cruise’s autonomous cars have also interfered with active firefighting, and firefighters once shattered a car’s window to prevent it from driving over their firehoses, the city said.
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