Inside Cruise’s Bumpy Ride: The Limits of Self-Driving Cars
When General Motors paid $581 million for self-driving car startup Cruise in 2016, it was one of the biggest bets by a company in the nascent business. Two years later, Cruise is a case study of the perils and the promise of self-driving car technology.
Despite some advances, Cruise’s vehicles being tested in San Francisco are still repeatedly involved in accidents, or near-accidents where a person has to grab the wheel of the car to avoid a collision. As a result, despite promises that autonomous vehicles could be available in the next few years, it is likely to be a decade before the cars come into wide use in major cities, according to a person with direct knowledge of Cruise’s technology.
It also means that GM will find it difficult to achieve its aim of launching by next year a taxi service using self-driving cars “at scale in dense urban environments.”
The problem is the nature of the technology, which requires cars to follow traffic laws exactly—and handle countless individual scenarios. Some of those can confuse the vehicles. Cruise cars frequently swerve and hesitate, according to interviews with people who have knowledge about the program and internal data about its challenges. (See videos below.) They sometimes slow down or stop if they see a bush on the side of a street or a lane-dividing pole, mistaking it for an object in their path. This overly cautious behavior creates frequent problems for drivers in regular cars, in some cases causing accidents—even if the human driver is legally at fault.
Cruise, alongside Alphabet’s Waymo, has garnered outsize attention in the race to build self-driving cars. Waymo, which has said it has spent far more than $1 billion on research and development, decided to focus on the relatively easier suburban areas around Phoenix in order to be first to launch a fully autonomous ride-hailing service to the public.
The full extent of the Cruise vehicles’ limitations (scroll down to see a list) haven’t been previously reported. They provide a window of how daunting it is to develop a fully self-driving vehicle and why expectations about its arrival and life-transforming abilities should be curbed significantly.
Waymo and other autonomous vehicle developers have had many of the same issues as Cruise, though Cruise is one of the only programs to seriously tackle a big city. And even in less intense environments, such as suburban Phoenix, Waymo has faced plenty of technical challenges, including making “unprotected” left turns. In prior years Waymo also faced issues with rear-endings caused by its cars’ overly cautious approach.
Cruise is a “bellwether for the other big programs that are just starting to tackle the urban environment,” said Anne Widera, a former manager at Waymo and Uber’s self-driving car team who now is a consultant.
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